The End of the Modern Age – Allen Wheelis

The Vision of Modern Age.
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There is a parallel between the character of an age and of a man. The character of a man derives from his actions, from those things he does so typically and repeatedly that they become established modes of behavior, having independent authority, in some sense operative even when quiescent-as stealing is active in the character of a thief even when he is not engaged in theft, as kindness is active in the character of a good man even when he is not helping a neighbor. We are what we do. But what we do derives in turn from an image of self, a vision antecedent to action. A child whose parents despise him learns what he is from the way they regard him, and the image so formed is likely to be that of an unworthy person who will be led by that image to anticipate not love but rejection. From such a self-image -which may be unconscious and hence inaccessible to reflection or to instruction-proceed aggressive and retaliatory actions which, becoming in time established modes of behavior, define the character of the man whom the child has become.

The character of an age bears analogy to this individual process. The quality of the Modern Age derives from what we have been doing during the last four. hundred years, and so may be fairly characterized as the age of science and technology. But these scientific and technological things we have been doing derive from our collective self-image. The will that drives man on to great achievement depends on vision. The dream must come first to guide the effort, shape the leap, sustain the courage. In the sixteenth century man created an image of the limitless power of intelligence and found himself, dreamlike, saying, “Without help from God I can know the world”; and by virtue of believing it proceeded, in large measure, to make it true. The vast gain in reliable knowledge, in control of natural forces, is the result, and could not have come about had man continued to see himself as a humble worker in God’s vineyard. By virtue of dreaming himself in charge, master of all that he can survey and understand-not boss of the operation exactly, but no one over him - he has made spectacular gains in knowing and now is drunk on wine. Pride goeth before a fall, and man is reeling and fall may be imminent, but we must grant pride its due: it made possible a great achievement in knowing. Such insight does not issue from modesty .
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The Dream of Mechanism
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The works of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo were quivering fragments, alive with hidden relatedness. In Newton’s hands they came together in solid interlock, revealed a coherent cosmic order governed by law-exact, permitting of no exception, given in the language of mathematics. The vision was not offered by God, but achieved by man. Man fumbled, made mistakes, false starts, but persevered. No one held his hand, no one showed the way, he got there on his own. Man can know the world. The Modem Age spreads its glittering vista, Faust begins his meteoric career.

Since nature is a mechanism, perhaps there is a natural order also for society, a right way for men to live together. Newton’s success in discovering nature’s laws led to the hope that laws of society-from which man had strayed in ignorance and error might also be found, might then provide the basis on which a just society could be built. The Philosophers claimed social facts as legitimate objects of science, confident on Cartesian authority that within the diversity of custom lay certain clear and simple principles which, if they could be discovered and set forth plainly, all men of good sense would recognize. “Even though that which in one region is called virtue,” wrote Voltaire, “is precisely that which in another is called vice, even though most rules regarding good and bad are as variable as the languages one speaks and the clothing one wears; nevertheless it seems to me certain there are natural laws with respect to which human beings in all parts of the world must agree.” 10 “Laws are the necessary relations which derive from the nature of things,” wrote Montesquieu;

and in this sense, all beings have their laws: the divinity has its laws, the material world its laws . . . man has his laws. Those who have said that a blind fatality has produced all the effects that we see in the world have uttered the great absurdity; for what greater absurdity than a blind fatality which has produced intelligent beings. Therefore, there is an original reason; and laws are the relations which are found between it and different beings, and the relations of these beings among themselves.

Montesquieu, and later Locke, proceeded to “discover” and formulate these laws-balance of powers between king, aristocracy, and the people; separation of executive, legislative, and judicial functions -and to them man .began to ascribe some of that same certainty that attached to Newton’s laws. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” wrote Jefferson, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. -That to secure these rights Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Adam Smith, anticipating Marx, perceived historical change to issue from motives remote from any concern with the changes they were bringing about. “Human society,” he wrote, “when we contemplate it in a certain abstract and philosophical light, appears like a great, an immense machine whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects.” Feudal society, he believed, came to an end because feudal lords exchanged their surplus produce for the luxuries produced by the towns. “A revolution of the greatest importance to the public happiness,” he wrote in The Wealth of Nations, was in this manner brought about by two different orders of people who had not the least intention to serve the public. To gratify the most childish vanity was the sole motive of the great proprietors. The merchants and artificers, much less ridiculous, acted merely from a view to their own interest, and in pursuit of their own peddlar principles of turning a penny wherever a penny was to be got. Neither of them had either knowledge or foresight of that great revolution which the folly of the one, and the industry of the other, was gradually bringing about.

As human nature and social institutions were thus incorporated in the great clock, intentions became less important. The prudent investor “is led as though by an invisible hand to promote an end which is no part of his intention.” “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker,” Smith argues, “that we expect our dinner, but from their regard of their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity, but to their self love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantage.” Since the social machine proceeds thus inexorably and inscrutably upon its own beneficent course, human intentions were freed of moral restraint, and cupidity could indulge itself with a sense of self-righteousness, assuming that the long-range effect would be social advantage.
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And as it is better for the investigation that the “object” not know he is being studied, so certainly it is better for the subsequent reshaping that he not know he is being altered. For so perverse is man that he will likely react with resistance to the awareness that he is being controlled, even though he be assured it is for his own good.

In the late nineteenth century, on the furthermost reach of the wave, mechanism laid claim to the soul itself. The interior life accessible to introspection is a mechanistic function of the next level down, the level of unconscious drive, defense, and conflict; and soon, it may be assumed, these unconscious phenomena may themselves similarly be reduced to neurophysiology. Freud diagrammed the psychic apparatus, postulated those forces however hidden which would be required to make it tick, and developed a method which presumed to demonstrate the wheels upon wheels which had been inferred. Analysts sat behind couches, listened to free associations, explained to patients the causalities which had shaped them, and expected them then to be different from that which they had just proven to them they could not help being, untroubled by this or by that other, even more curious, matter that they too, the analysts, must be automata and could no more help construing the patient’s life in the particular way they had arrived at than could the patient in accepting it or resisting it, and that indeed what might sound like a meaningful dialogue must be rather the synchronous but unrelated ticking of two clocks in the clock shop.

There were tremors to stir us. Becquerel found that atoms break down to energy, Einstein was reshaping Newton’s machine into something more plastic and mysterious, but we were so long asleep that mechanism had become our reality, life itself our dream.

The Man Who Looked Into the Future.

Once upon a time there was a man who yearned toward the future. With clear vulnerable eyes he looked over present pain to misty goodness ahead. The present was a cruel and capricious wind, scraps of paper swirling around his legs, packed grimy snow at the street corner, cinder in the eye, the pretty girl clicking by on spike heels with no glance for him, furnished room, failure, facelessness. The future was a pretty girl looking up with adoration, lips parting, flesh melting in a sacrament of passion; was great discoveries to the benefit of mankind, and incidentally to his own security and fame; was acts of honor, heroism and sacrifice which
would imprint upon flux and happenstance a seal of meaning. The present was contingency and death; the future was necessity and eternal life. The present was a desert across which, by ceaseless toil, he struggled toward the garden of the future.

He became a mathematician, got a job at IBM, sat at a desk, covered long rolls of paper with figures, could calculate with lightning speed. The digits were the present, their laws were the future; he struggled into the future of laws, replaced temporal digits with eternal symbols. He had great gift. From his pen flowed Greek letters, curved lines, pyramids, pictographs, curious marks; flowed with incredible speed from brain to pen, covering the paper with the score of strange wonderful music. He was relieved of tasks, given an office of his own, allowed to think at will and do nothing else; and from the strange music of his brain flowed great discoveries in quantum theory and statistics, from which IBM developed new polling methods of extraordinary accuracy. “You have given us,” the President said, conferring upon him the Gold Medal of Merit, “the gift of prophecy.” He looked up from his equations at the quivering jowls of the President, glanced around at the board of directors who were politely applauding, and saw that his gift was being efficiently translated into money.

He started his own company, made more discoveries, improved his methods, could predict national elections within a tenth of one percent, foretold business recessions, depressions, fluctuations in the price of gold. One evening toward the end of a long market slump he was able to predict that the Dow Jones average would jump fifteen points the next day, forty-five more by the end of the week, and this certainly was good news for the country at large, but the fact that he knew it first, it occurred to him, could be even better news for him personally. He borrowed fifty thousand dollars, bought Xerox on margin.

People trusted him. So successful he became that his own predictions became factors to reckon with in his total calculations. If he found that Industrials would jump ten points, then that prediction itself would cause another rise of four-to a total of fourteen. His equations became more complicated, began to correct themselves: any particular equation, arrived at by him, became a quantity of force altering the aggregates of forces being equated. So his calculations became self-conscious, the strange music of his pen began to listen to its own melody, to make corrections in its own intensity, even at times to change its theme. Many political candidates, in fact, would decide, months in advance of announcing their candidacy, not to run, conceding defeat in some phantom election of the future which had in a sense already occurred and therefore would never take place.

The President of the United States called often, came to depend upon him. “What will it do to my popularity if I veto the fair housing bill?” “What will be the effect over a period of three months on the number of registered Democrats in Dutchess County if I step up the bombing fifteen percent?” “Dear friend,” “the President said one day with tears in his eyes, “I really couldn’t do without you. You’re my right arm.” “Think nothing of it,” said the mathematician, and upped his fee another hundred thousand dollars. He developed the largest polling service in the world with offices in every county in the United States and every country of the world.

As he became more famous and more wealthy he noticed a curious trend in his life: the more he could see into the future the more he lived in the present. Formerly he had filled the present with drudgery, located all pleasure in the future. Now it was turning the other way around. All right, he thought, I’ll try it, will go all the way. The first half of my life was given to the future, the rest I’ll give to the present, will make no commitment to anyone or anything. He stopped working, didn’t have to, his organization could run itself. Leases on his patents brought in floods of money. He sighed happily, resigned himself to a life of pleasure-girls, gambling, auto racing, gourmet food.

Gradually having fun became a strain, he had to work at it, and the time came finally when he could no longer conceal this from himself. “I can’t bear doing just what I want to do,” he said, “I’ll go crazy.” But he was crazy anyway, he knew, because what better thing could he do than what he wanted to do? This is a problem, he said, and got out his slide rule and pencil and paper. “Let a represent any value. Then perhaps it may be said that a cannot exist alone, but only in relation to b, c, d. . . . Everything, that is, has to be validated by something else, and a present for which no future vouches is worthless.”

This hypothesis he found unpleasant, even sinister, for it would push him right back where he came from, toward a commitment to the future. He struggled against it. “I don’t want to live that way,” he said. “I’ve had it, it’s no good, it’s a waiting, a fast, and I want to feast, now, now, now!” So he tried even harder. The eating of delicate delicious food, he thought, surely that must be a value in itself, something that can stand against any nihilism. He tried, became a habitue of the great restaurants of the world, but found that the eating of food wants to serve the morrow, that when the morrow it serves contains nothing more than eating, that food itself becomes dust. In the Tour d’Argent he pondered this matter, looked out unseeing over Notre Dame, brooded on the crystalline evening, pulled his eyebrows, while before him appeared, successively, Croustades aux Truffes, Vol au Vent aux Quenelles de Brochet, Poitrine de Veau Farcie, Endives au Gratin-each served with great flourish, allowed to grow cold, sorrowfully removed. When finally the Souffle au Chocolat Flambe collapsed untouched the kitchen door splintered and the chef, as if fired from a cannon, hurled himself upon the reluctant diner, threw all the dishes on the floor, smashed the table, and had to be hospitalized. In the Four Seasons he looked out over a smoky red Manhattan sunset, did not notice the Pintade au Genievre nor realize that the man in black tie who had sat down beside him and was weeping in a napkin was the Maitre d’.

But orgasm, he thought, now there’s a thing in itself, the supreme value, perhaps the only one that can stand alone, needing no validation. He polled the model agencies, gathered together the most beautiful girls in the world. It didn’t work. He became frantic, tried two at a time, then a whole roomful, but it failed. Orgasm, he found, is a jewel which, the more it glitters, the more it cries out for a setting of love, lacking which the sparkle is lost and the jewel falls unnoticed to the floor. But love lays claim to the future, commits the present to the securing of that future.

So the present turned to dust. Very well, he thought, I’ll go back to my old ways, will tie myself to the future. The present will acquire value relative to future goods. But the future now seemed dismal, boring, without good. He scratched frantically, but all he could find in the future was more of the present-wars, depressions, labor disputes, revolutions, counterrevolutions, hurricanes, airplane crashes, people being born, people dying. As for the market-it would continue to fluctuate. The more clearly the future could be seen, the more evident that it could validate nothing.

He had painted himself into a comer. Sensuality, referring to nothing beyond the senses, had become boredom. On gourmet meals he had become not fat, but quite thin. And though he still bedded girls on occasion it was with a hidden elegiac asceticism, as if looking for God. Through temples of pleasure he wandered, untempted, out into the desert to draw faces in the sand.

The vision is lost. Even if the world were a machine, if Bohr, Heisenberg, and Born were mistaken, and if quantum events could be reduced to predictable occurrence by formula-even then the causal view is lost. Mathematics itself precludes that final crystalline clarity for which mathematics has for centuries been the symbol. For if the cosmos were a machine, everything within that cosmos-shoes and ships, cabbages and countesses and worms, the mind of man and every last thought and theory and feeling of man-would be part of that machine. Therefore we who think about these matters and speculate on the possibly machine-like nature of the universe would be in the position of one cog on one wheel attempting to figure out whether the whole apparatus is or is not a machine. Coders theory, as well as quite common commonsense, indicates that this is not possible; that though the cog might formulate the problem it could not, within the machine, answer it; that since, in this case, the machine is the entire cosmos, there is not, even in principle, a way to stand outside it; that, therefore, the question cannot be answered nor the problem ever solved; and that, consequently, the supposition is idle and meaningless, like a man before a mirror asking the man he sees what the man in the mirror is asking.

Pursuit of the Diminishing Object
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Already in the nineteenth century it had been found that field phenomena cannot be reduced to mechanics. But by then the wheels and gears were inside our heads. “I am never content,” writes Lord Kelvin as late as 1884, “until I have constructed a mechanical model of the object 1 am studying. If I succeed in making one, I understand; otherwise I do not. Hence I cannot grasp the electromagnetic theory of light. I wish to understand light as fully as possible, without introducing things that I understand still less.”

At the same time the humanities, straining desperately to be sciences and always lagging, were entering their most mechanistic phase. Biology with Darwin, sociology with Marx, psychology with Freud, all saw the hidden machine, all strove to reduce variety of experience to unity of principle, apparent newness to hidden recurrence, the unforeseeable to the inevitable, appearance to reality. “The chaotic universe of change,” Barzun writes, referring to Darwin and to Marx,

was made rational by the ordinary fact of struggle; the anarchy of social existence was organized around class hatred. . . . The beholder began with a matter of fact and could reach symbolism and true knowledge with only an effort of application and memory. Physical struggle led to survival, physical labor to value . . . and at the end of each system yielded the most exalted objects of contemplation; the adaptation of living form; a perfect state. . . .

In mechanism, writes Whitehead, “the world had got hold of a general idea which it could neither live with nor live without.” “The misfortune,” Barzun writes, “was that when mechanism began to be questioned, for scientific reasons, the general public had become persuaded of its absolute truth; it could think in no other terms and it felt that all other views were simply ‘prescientific.’ ” Experimental physics cannot deal with the arsonist, has nothing to say about the contingency or inevitability of his behavior. The philosophy of mechanism assumes inevitability, and would wish to give force to this assumption by proving mechanism at the microscopic level. But what gets established when the cosmos is observed with very high magnification is indeterminacy and graininess. “When a slender beam of light is passed through a system of slits,” writes Bridgman,

the pattern ordinarily seen is . . . light and dark bands with smooth gradations from light to dark. But if the intensity of light is made very low, the smooth pattern breaks down into a pattern of individual spots, which mark the arrival of individual photons of light and the excitation of individual grains of the photographic emulsion. The place and time of occurrence of any individual spot in this pattern are at present absolutely unpredictable.

It is not, however, necessary, he adds, that this unpredictable event have only microscopic consequences, for “it would be possible so to couple a disintegrating speck of some radioactive compound to an atomic bomb as to blow up a city at an absolutely unpredictable time.” Likewise, we would add, the arrival of that photon at one point rather than another within the nucleus of one brain cell might achieve an equal extension of effect, perhaps sufficient to make the difference between the arsonist’s hurling of the bomb or his dropping it in the gutter.

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Who are we to claim objectivity? We are the interested judge, we hold stock in this corporation. And have we not, moreover, known it all along? Has not our seeming unawareness been designed to retain for us, if challenged, the right to claim inadvertence? Now indeed we are challenged and the inadvertence is not credible. We had hoped, if we just kept quiet, that it would go away, that no one would notice. We have come a long way on false credentials; now our time of arrogance is coming to an end. We are not entitled to grace in getting out, to peace with honor; we’re being driven and had better hurry. Unless we acknowledge our compromised position and disqualify ourselves as judge we shall be hauled down from the bench and beaten to our knees with weapons of our own presumption.

We have lost the division between subject and object, are left with a field of knowing in which object partakes of subject. From hovering helicopter we shoot the fleeing polar bear and, while he is stunned, tag him; and, finding him again next year, we “know” something about the migration of polar bears. But the bear we know has had the encounter, has suffered the poisoned dart, and so may have roamed a different floe, drifted in different currents. Whatever we know of anything has come to be known, not only by our perceptions and our measurements, but also by our questions which derive from what we are and what we believe-things which change with time. Another type of being with different preconceptions addressing itself to the same phenomenon would arrive at different knowledge.

The knower, likewise, is changed by the known. We may never forget that polar bear, the terror and hate on his face, the frantic scampering to escape the clatter of the helicopter, the wash of the blades, the merciless trajectory of the dart; and the memory may change us, may lead us one day years later to befriend a wounded raccoon, to take him home, not knowing he has rabies, where he bites the thumb of a gifted pianist, our wife’s cousin, who had stopped in for tea.

The world to us is a woman in our arms; we may know her but will change her, and in being known she changes us. So we hold the world and are held by it, struggle together, are bound together inalienable, and so sail through a void forever. We should not boast of conquest-modesty better becomes our achievements in knowing-mindful that she whom we held yesterday may surprise us today with qualities born of the embrace. She’s not of iron, but mutable as are we; and we may, if careless, destroy in her what most we love.
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Relativity of Knowledge
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In the evening the other members of the expedition returned without Vavilov. He was taken so fast his things were left in one of the cars. But late at night three men in civilian clothes came to fetch them. One of the members of the expedition started sorting out the bags piled up in the corner of the room, looking for V avilov ‘s. When it was located it was found to contain a big sheaf of spelt, a half-wild local type of wheat. . . . It was later discovered to be a new species. Thus, on his last day of service to his country. . . Vavilov made his last. . . discovery

He was tried, sentenced to death, died in prison of starvation. Efforts to locate his grave have failed. The book in which the Russian geneticist Medvedev recounts these events was denied publication; when it was nevertheless published in America, Medvedev was suddenly committed to an insane asylum.

“We should like to have good rulers,” writes Karl Popper,

but historical experience shows us that we are not likely to get them. This is why it is of such importance to design institutions which will prevent even bad rulers from causing too much damage. . . . There are only two kinds of governmental institutions, those which provide for a change of the government without bloodshed, and those which do not. Marxists have been taught to think in terms not of institutions but of classes. Classes, however, never rule, any more than nations. The rulers are always certain persons. And, whatever class they may once have belonged to, once they are rulers they belong to the ruling class.
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The Illusionless Man: Some Fantasies and Meditations on Disillusionment – Allen Wheelis

The Illusionless Man and the Visionary Maid

Once upon a time there was a man who had no illusions about anything. While still in the crib he had learned that his mother was not always kind; at two he had given up fairies; witches and hobgoblins disappeared from his world at three; at four he knew that rabbits at Easter lay no eggs; and at five on a cold night in December, with a bitter little smile, he said good-bye to Santa Claus. At six when he started school illusions flew from his life like feathers in a windstorm: he discovered that his father was not always brave or even honest, that presidents are little men, that the Queen of England goes to the bathroom like everybody else, and that his first-grade teacher, a pretty round-faced young woman with dimples, did not know everything, as he had thought, but thought only of men and did not in fact know much of anything. At eight he could read, and the printed word was a sorcerer at exorcising illusions-only he knew there were no sorcerers. The abyss of hell disappeared into the even larger abyss into which a clear vision was sweeping his beliefs. Happiness was of course a myth; love a fleeting attachment, a dream of enduring selflessness glued onto the instinct of a rabbit. At twelve he dispatched into the night sky his last unheard prayer. As a young man he realized that the most generous act is self-serving, the most disinterested inquiry serves interest; that lies are told by printed words, even by words carved in stone; that art begins with a small “a” like everything else, and that he could not escape the ruin of value by orchestrating a cry of despair into a song of lasting beauty; for beauty passes and deathless art is quite mortal. Of all those people who lose illusions he lost more than anyone else, taboo and prescription alike; and as everything became permitted nothing was left worth while.

He became a carpenter but could see a house begin to decay in the course of building-perfect pyramid of white sand spreading out irretrievably in the grass, bricks chipping, doors sticking, the first tone of gray appearing on white lumber, the first film of rust on bright nails, the first leaf falling in the shining gutter. He became then a termite inspector, spent his days crawling in darkness under old houses; he lived in a basement room and never raised the blinds, ate canned beans and frozen television dinners, let his hair grow and his beard. On Sundays he walked in the park, threw bread to the ducks-dry French bread, stone-hard, would stamp on it with his heel, gather up the pieces, and walk along the pond, throwing it out to the avid ducks paddling after him, thinking glumly that they would be just as hungry again tomorrow. His name was Henry.

One day in the park he met a girl who believed in everything. In the forest she still glimpsed fairies, heard them whisper; bunnies hopped for her at Easter, laid brilliant eggs; at Christmas hoofbeats shook the roof. She was disillusioned at times and would flounder, gasp desperately, like a fish in sand, but not for long; would quickly, sometimes instantly, find something new, and actually never gave up any illusion but would lay it aside when necessary, forget it, and whenever it was needed back it would come. Her name was Lorabelle, and when she saw a bearded young man in the park, alone among couples, stamping on the hard bread, tossing it irritably to the quacking ducks, she exploded into illusions about him like a Roman candle over a desert.

“You are a great and good man,” she said.

“I’m petty and self-absorbed,” he said.

“You’re terribly unhappy.”

“I’m morose. . . probably like it that way.”

“You have suffered a ‘great deal,” she said. “I see it in your face.”

“I’ve been diligent only in self-pity,” he said, “have turned away from everything difficult, and what you see is the scars of old acne shining through my beard; I could never give up chocolate and nuts.”

“You’re very wise,” she said.

“No, but intelligent.”

They talked about love, beauty, feeling, value, love, life, work, death-and always she came back to love. They argued about everything, differed on everything, agreed on nothing, and so she fell in love with him. “This partakes of the infinite,” she said.

But he, being an illusionless man, was only fond of her.

“It partaketh mainly,” he said, “of body chemistry,” and passed his hand over her roundest curve.

“We have a unique affinity,” she said. “You’re the only man in the world for me.”

“We fit quite nicely,” he said. “You are one of no more than five or six girls in the county for me.”

“It’s a miracle we met,” she said.

“I just happened to be feeding the ducks.”

“No, no, no, not chance; I couldn’t feel this way about anybody else.”

“If you’d come down the other side of the hill,” he said, “you’d be feeling this way right now about somebody else. And if I had fed squirrels instead of ducks I’d be playing with somebody else’s curves.”

“You’re my dearest darling squirrel,” she said, “and most of all you’re my silly fuzzy duck, and I don’t know why I bother to love you-
why are you such a fool? who dropped you on your head?–come to bed’” On such a note of logic, always, their arguments ended.

She wanted a wedding in church with a dress of white Alencson lace over cream satin, bridesmaids in pink, organ music, and lots of people to weep and be happy and throw rice. “You’ll be so handsome in a morning coat,” she said, brushing cobwebs from his shoulders, “oh and striped pants, too, and a gray silk cravat, and a white carnation. You’ll be divine.”

“I’d look a proper fool,” he said, “and I’m damned if I’ll do it.”

“Oh please I It’s only once.”

“Once a fool, voluntarily, is too often.”

“It’s a sacrament.”

“It’s a barbarism.”

“Symbols are important.”

“Then let’s stand by the Washington Monument,” he said, “and be honest about it.”

“You make fun,” she said, “but it’s a holy ceremony, a solemn exchange of vows before man and God.”

“God won’t be there, honey; the women will be weeping for their own lost youth and innocence, the men wanting to have you in bed; and the priest standing slightly above us will be looking down your cleavage as his mouth goes dry; and the whole thing will be a primitive and preposterous attempt to invest copulation with dignity and permanence, to enforce responsibility for children by the authority of a myth no longer credible even to a child.”

So . . . they were married in church: his hands were wet and his knees shook, he frowned and quaked; but looked divine, she said, in morning coat and striped pants; and she was serene and beautiful in Alencon lace; the organ pealed, weeping women watched with joy, vows were said, rice thrown, and then they were alone on the back seat of a taxi, her red lips seeking his, murmuring, “I’m so happy, darling, so terribly happy. Now we’ll be together always.”

“In our community,” he said, “and for our age and economic bracket, we have a 47.3% chance of staying together
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Suddenly, all at once, she looked at him with a level detached gaze and did not like what she saw. “You were right,” she said, “you are petty and self-absorbed. What’s worse, you have a legal mind, and there’s no poetry in you. You don’t give me anything, don’t even love me, you’re dull. You were stuck in a hole in the ground when I found you, and if I hadn’t pulled you out you’d be there still. There’s no life in you. I give you everything, and it’s not enough, doesn’t make any difference. You can’t wait to die, want to bury yourself now and me with you. Well I’m not ready yet, and I’m not going to put up with it any’ longer, and now I’m through with you, and I want a divorce.”

“You’ve lost your illusions about me,” he said, “but not the having of illusions. . .”

“While you,” she said, “have lost your illusions about everything and can’t get over being sore about it.”

“. . . they’ll focus on someone else . . .”

“Oh I hope sol” she said; “I can hardly wait.”

“. . . you waste experience.”

“And you waste life!”

He wouldn’t give her a divorce, but that didn’t matter; for she couldn’t bear the thought of his moving back to that basement, and anyway, she told herself, he had to have someone to look after him; so they lived together still, and she cooked for him when she was home and mended his clothes and darned his socks, and when he asked why, she said, with sweet revenge, “Because I’m fond of you, that’s all. Just fond.”
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“Give me some money,” he said tonelessly. “We haven’t any.”

He got up, walked unsteadily to the table where she was sitting, opened her purse and took out her wallet. A few coins fell to the table, rolled on the floor; there were no bills. He turned her handbag upside down: an astrology chart tumbled out, then a Christian Science booklet, a handbill from the Watchtower Society, “Palmistry in Six Easy Lessons,” dozens of old sweepstakes tickets and the three new ones, “Love and the Mystic Union,” fortunes from Chinese cookies (one of which, saying “He loves you,” she snatched away from him), a silver rosary, a daily discipline from the Rosicrucians, the announcement of a book titled Secret Power from the Unconscious through Hypnosis-but no money. He shook the bag furiously and threw it in a comer, surveyed the litter before him with unblinking bloodshot eyes, his face expressionless. “Stupid fool” he said thickly. “Purse full of illusions. . . suitcase full of illusions . . . whole god damned lousy life full of illusions . . .” He turned away, stumbled back to the table, put the empty gin bottle to his mouth, turned it over his head, broke it on the hearth.

“Oh, my dear,” Lorabelle cried, her eyes wet, “you keep waiting for the real thing, but this is all there is.” He turned ponderously, facing her, eyes like marble; she came to him. “These are the days . . . and nights . . . of our years and they’re passing-look at us! we’re getting old – and what else is there?”
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That night they slept in each other’s arms and the next day the windfall was gone: it had been a mistake, the officials were terribly sorry, it was another man with the same name and almost the same telephone number, who owned a candy store and had five children, weighed three hundred pounds, and was pictured in the newspaper with his family, seven round beaming faces. Lorabelle was in despair, but Henry was tranquil, still felt that lightness of heart. He comforted Lorabelle and stroked her finally to sleep in the evening, her wet face on his shoulder. It was an illusion, he thought, and for a while I believed it, and yet-curious thing-it has left some sweetness. Throughout the night he marveled about this-could it be that he had won something after am-and the next day, crawling under the rotting mansion of a long-dead actor, he looked a termite in the eye and decided to build a house.

He bought land by the sea and built on a cliff by a great madrona tree that grew out horizontally from the rock, a shimmering cloud of red and green; built with massive A-frames, bolted together, stressed, braced, anchored in concrete to withstand five-hundred-mile winds, a house in the best illusory style, he thought wryly-to last forever. But the cliff crumbled one night in a storm during a twentyfour foot tide; Lorabelle and Henry stood hand in hand in the rain and lightning, deafened by crashing surf and thunder, as the house fell slowly into the sea while the great madrona remained, anchored in nothing but dreams. They went on to live in an apartment, and Henry worked as a carpenter, built houses for other people, began planning another house of his own.
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One afternoon Lorabelle came home in a rapturous mood. “Oh, Henry, I’ve met the most wonderful man!”.
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Henry caught her at the door, turned her over his knee, applied the flat of his hand to the bottom of his delight; and it was perhaps that same night -for she did not go out-that Lorabelle got pregnant, and this time didn’t lose it: the baby was born on Christmas, blue eyes and golden hair, and they named her Noel.

Henry built a house of solid brick in a meadow of sage and thyme, and there Noel played with flowers and crickets and butterflies and field mice. Most of the time she was a joy to her parents, and some of the time-when she was sick or unkind-she was a sorrow. Lorabelle loved the brick house, painted walls, hung pictures, and polished floors; on hands and knees with a bonnet on her head she dug in the earth and planted flowers, looked up at Henry through a wisp of hair with a happy smile; “We’ll never move again,” she said. But one day the state sent them away and took over their house to build a freeway. The steel ball crashed through the brick walls, bulldozers sheared away the flower beds, the great shovels swung in, and the house was gone. Henry and Lorabelle and Noel moved back to the city, lived in a tiny flat under a water tank that dripped continuously on the roof and sounded like rain.

Henry and Lorabelle loved each other most of the time, tried to love each other all the time, to create a pure bond, but could not. It was marred by the viciousness, shocking to them, with which they hurt each other. Out of nothing they would create fights, would yell at each other, hate, withdraw finally in bitter silent armistice; then, after a few hours, or sometimes a few days, would come together again, with some final slashes and skirmishes, and try to work things out-to explain, protest, forgive, understand, forget, and above all to compromise. It was a terribly painful and always uncertain process; and even while it was underway Henry would think bleakly, It won’t last, will never last; we’ll get through this one maybe, probably, then all will be well for a while-a few hours, days, weeks if we’re lucky-then another fight over something-what? -not possible to know or predict, and certainly not to prevent, . . . and then all this to go through again; and beyond that still another fight looming in the mist ahead, coming closer, . . . and so on without end. But even while thinking these things he still would try to work through the current trouble because, as he would say, “There isn’t anything else.” And sometimes there occurred to him, uneasily, beyond all this gloomy reflection, an even more sinister thought: that their fights were not only unavoidable but also, perhaps, necessary; for their passages of greatest tenderness followed hard upon their times of greatest bitterness, as if love could be renewed only by gusts of destruction.

Nor could Henry ever build a house that would last forever, no more than anyone else; but he built one finally that lasted quite a while, a white house on a hill with lilac and laurel and three tall trees, a maple, a cedar, and a hemlock. It was an ordinary house of ordinary wood, and the termites caused some trouble, and always it needed painting or a new roof or a faucet dripped or something else needed fixing, and he grew old and gray and finally quite stopped doing these things, but that was all right, he knew, because there wasn’t anything else.
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Every morning Henry took his tools and went to his work of building houses-saw the pyramid of white sand spreading out in the grass, the bricks chipping, the doors beginning to stick, the first tone of gray appearing on white lumber, the first leaf falling in the bright gutter but kept on hammering and kept on sawing, joining boards and raising rafters; on weekends he swept the driveway and mowed the grass, in the evenings fixed the leaking faucets, tried to straighten out the disagreements with Lorabelle; and in all that he did he could see himself striving toward a condition of beauty or truth or goodness or love that did not exist, but whereas earlier in his life he had always said, “It’s an illusion,” and turned away, now he said, “There isn’t anything else,” and stayed with it; and though it cannot be said that they lived happily, exactly, and certainly not ever after, they did live. They lived-for a while-with ups and downs, good days and bad, and when it came time to die Lorabelle said, “Now we’ll never be parted,” and. Henry smiled and kissed her and said to himself “There isn’t anything else,” and they died.
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The League of Death
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. . . Ah, my “problem.” I like your way of putting it. Makes it sound definable. There’s therapy in that already. Holds out hope, suggests that one may say “My problem is . . .” and find a way to finish. Not right away perhaps, but someday. And as soon as a problem is defined it’s on the way to being solved. Isn’t that right? So, let us begin. My problem is-it really is quite simple now that I think of it-my problem is boredom.

I know boredom, doctor, as do few others. Have lived with it, absorbed its quality, taste, felt its weight on my bones. Look, that wall of fog outside the Golden Gate-see the slow relentless boiling? It will sweep in after a while under the bridge, extinguish every sparkling point of light and water, every bright sail, will rise, envelop the city, the hills, may enter even this room up to the ceiling. A sinister and fatal boredom, like that fog, chums at the edges of my life, is never far away; rolls in, creeps in, worms in; into mouth and lungs, a gray gorge rising, choking me, rising higher, behind my eyes. I’ve grappled with it for years only that’s just the trouble, you can’t grapple with fog, there’s no hand-hold. On countless days I’ve looked out on such a scene as this-my office has the same view–on such splendor, and felt like a prisoner on Alcatraz. But they were luckier; could believe that bars confined them, dream of release or escape, while I know the prison to be the walls of my skull, or some stiffening perimeter of spirit, perhaps, and no getting away. Oh, I know boredom.

. . . Hard to say, I don’t know that I’m bored about anything. More like the color of hair: boredom pertains to me as, say, hope to others. Look, it’s not so complicated: if you’re committed to people you’re not bored, if you’re not you are. It’s that simple. We just don’t like it. And being committed to people means doing something for them -teaching a class, building a house, fixing a car-not just a job, but putting some heart in it. But when you’ve done that for a while, whatever it is, and got good at it, just then the corruption begins. It seeps in through the first cracks – some indifference, some cutting of corners-the cracks get bigger, and then one day your heart’s not in it any more. The work goes on, looks pretty much the same from the outside, but now it’s more for the money or to keep busy or distract yourself or maybe to pretend that nothing is changed. That’s when you get bored. You know what I mean? Somehow the forms of social committment betray us, slip away; the visions of service become shabby. They stand around in our minds still, like the dusty scenery of some old play, but generate no action. It happens to all of us, to you too perhaps? No?
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Good afternoon, doctor. You look tired. Tuesday is perhaps a bad day? It is for me: the pleasures of the weekend already forgotten in the strain of Monday; the weekend to come still too far away to lift one’s spirit. And five o’clock is the nadir of this low day. You’ve seen nine patients, I imagine, and two to go. You have a right to be tired. I work the same way, and never at a loss for a creditable reason, but suspect all reasons. You know what my accountant said? “You’re a money-making machine. IBM should copy you. “

. . . This chatter bothers you, I think. You want me to get down to business. . . . Ah, my cure for boredom. I’m glad you ask. It’s my major interest, my life work, there’s nothing I’d rather tell you.

It goes back a long time; I discovered the cure, in fact, before I knew the ailment. Death was the whole of my childhood: the broken doll, the stuffing coming out of my teddy bear, the flies and mosquitoes killed without a thought, the snail stepped on after a rain. Everywhere I looked there it was, and sometimes terribly close: once my mother dropping a live lobster into boiling water, and I simply could not believe that this was she who tucked me in and drove away my demons at night. How can one reconcile such images? If you’re interested in psychodynamics. doctor, put that down as the primal scene for me, the trauma that shaped the future. It was then I think, that death got in my eyes, and ever since they’ve been still and make people uneasy. In the car by my father I would watch with dread for the next smear of fur and gore; and after a while I wouldn’t get in a car. I refused to eat meat. became thin. One day as I got up from the table my father said, “That belt you’re wearing. ‘Genuine Cowhide…. “I’ll use a string,” I said. “And your shoes,” he went on, “you know what they are?” “I’ll go barefooted.” “And the sweatband of your cap?” I threw it in the comer. He took my ball, tossed it lightly; he was relentless: “Now this,” he said, “is covered with the skin of a horse.” So I was defeated, knew that my hands too were red, went back to eating meat and never felt innocent again.
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“Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K.,” said Kafka, “for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” Someone has indeed been telling lies; we have, for centuries; and when finally they get brushed away a sentence of death is exposed. Copernicus swept out a pretty big lie; Darwin and Einstein tossed out two more. The pace of this housekeeping gets faster all the time, and by now the cupboard is nearly bare of the great lies we call absolute verities, and that’s all we ever had to hide death. After the First World War we took time out of its secret pocket and put it on our wrist and now everybody can hear the tick. I heard it very loud. I sat there alone and read, and after a while began to feel myself dying.

It was there that Mariette found me. She was the landlord’s daughter, and one evening-the fourth of July, as I learned-she came in my room, raised the shades, and said, “Look at the beautiful bursts of light, yellow and green and blue and red. Look at the fountain of fire!” She came back often, looked in my eyes and was unafraid. She didn’t like to be indoors, wanted sun and wind on her skin, made me walk with her. She laughed, looked everywhere and always saw something beautiful. We fell in love, were married. “What shall I do?” I said, looked in her face, and found no answer. I became a partner in a trucking firm, bought a fine house, drove a Lincoln; was bored. “It’s an accumulation of things,” I said. “I want life to mean something.”

“Better it be something,” Mariette said. “I don’t want to live just for myself,” I said. “Look at the swallows building a nest,” she said. I studied economics, mastered price theory, became an advisor to the Department of Commerce; and was bored. “Why does everything fail” I said. “Look at the yellow leaves,” Mariette said. “I don’t want to look at any god-damned leaves!” I shouted. “I’m looking for meaning, don’t know where I’ll find it, but not up any tree.” I studied philosophy, learned about essence, appearance, reality; and was bored. “Why can’t I make anything last?” I said. “Look at the storm clouds,” Mariette said. I changed to law, studied due process, equal rights, argued with brilliance, wrote books, became rich; and was bored. It was the same in law as everywhere else and too late then for still another change, and the great gray tide swept in, over me, as if to stay.

I turned back then to death. Only the bored have the leisure, the reflectiveness, and above all the proper frame of mind to study death. Because-do you know? – everything we do to fight boredom has a death-tasting quality. Have you noticed? Gambling, adultery, LSD-that sort of thing. Anything healthy is useless. So – our life is under the ax. with an indeterminate but limited stay of execution. What does it mean? What can one make of it? Not much, I thought-we die, that’s it. And most people if they consider it at all find it gloomy, I too.

Gradually, however, my view changed. I discovered the significance of death to be precisely opposite to what I had supposed: it is not the enemy of life but life’s great pillar, support.
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“We pretend, gentlemen, to be aware of the ax. But I must tell you we forget, we lie, live basely with the illusion of continuing life.” I presented, then, my new theory, captured them with its irrefutable logic, came to my peroration. “Stay with the Main Show, my friends. Never be drawn into side issues, entertainments. Stay right there at the center ring in the big top. And what is the Main Show? Ah, . . . you know, have only to listen to the muffled drum within, . . . you know! How to live, . . . the despair, . . . the great cutting edge on which your life is turning-that is the Main Show. Never leave it. A man is up there in the big top, the highest point, right under the canvas-see him!-there! hanging by his teeth, arms outstretched, spinning and turning. The colored spotlights play over him, the drums begin to roll. Most people are watching the dancing bears, but you, my friends, must fix your gaze on the dangling man. He’s going to fall in a minute, any moment now, and there’s nothing to. be done about that, there’s no net; but in the meantime he may achieve something truly remarkable, some glittering stunt perhaps, even a moment of heartbreaking beauty. The man is you: Stay with him. Don’t run away from yourself. It is not important that you be happy or that you be sad, that you live long or that you live short; what is important is that you live authentically. Do not run from the true condition of your life. Hold still, feel the cutting edge on your throat, watch the dangling man, study his condition. What in this precarious and fateful state can he still do?
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I was alone then, and didn’t care. Outwardly it made no difference. I would sit in my chair among things of beauty, and patients would come and I would listen; but inwardly-I hardly need tell you by now, doctor-all was changed. My newest insight had failed me, as had every other insight of my entire life. Nothing avails for long against the leeches of boredom, and they were sucking my blood again. I would sit through the day, listening as I could, and evening would come, the day’s work over, and I would simply go on sitting in my decorated prison. Nothing I wanted. I had money, leisure, freedom, independence, could do anything, go anywhere. What would it be tonight? Music? Krips is playing Das Lied von der Erde. Art? A great Impressionist show at the De Young Museum. Books, plays, movies, night clubs, gambling, girls everything all around. What did I want? Nothing. Not even food. Often would not go out to dinner or even to the kitchen, but sit staring at the sunset drinking gin.

Can you guess what happened” next? On just such an evening? the sun sinking? . . . No? Mariette came back. Key in the lock, door opening in the dusk, and there she was, arms around me, stroking, petting, kissing, dropping hot tears on my face. “Because I love you,” she said when I asked why. “And I hate you because I love you so much, can’t bear thinking of you alone. What’s the matter? You look so pale. I had to come back. Please be good to me.”

And so she began to show me the world again. We walked through the city holding hands: “Look at the children dancing.” We walked at night on the beach, arms around each other: “Look at the wake of the ship in the moonlight”; “Look at the footprints of the wind in the sand.” And in bed: “Look at me. Look at me, not through me.” But the old magic was gone. Nothing helped, the gleam in my eye grew brighter and made her sick. In the hospital I sat by her bed as she got weaker, and when she could no more than turn her head she still would say: “Look at the white clouds drifting”; “Look at the beautiful blue sky”; “Look at . . .”

. . . Sorry. For a moment I was overcome. I have a maudlin streak, you see. I’ll make it brief and dry as dust. She died of course, and only then did I see the obvious: She had known, always, what had taken me a lifetime to learn; she had achieved out of greatness of heart what still was beyond me-to love something enough to risk and lose her life. I say “something,” not “someone,” and maybe that’s my whole trouble. All along I’ve thought of what I sought as abstract, a principle or ideal, while she knew it was I, a particular man, whom she loved.
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To Be a God
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A deterministic psychoanalyst is like the Cretan passionately declaring all Cretans to be liars; like the barber, instructed to shave all men who do not shave themselves, wondering what to do about his own beard. As psychoanalysts our voices are getting hoarse, our beards are growing longer, and we are getting no wiser.

But one can’t keep walking away from one illusion into another. I see the pattern now, and with analysis I stick, and work; and gradually elaborate a criticism, giving up as little as possible. My disillusion, I decide, is not with the science of psychoanalysis but with its dearth of science. Too many unverifiable intuitions, too many glib explanations. Anybody who can learn to say “the opposite may also be true” can get to be an analyst. No search for a crucial experiment that might falsify our suppositions.

The wrath of disillusion is thus focused on one small outpost of science, and science itself goes scot free. Psychoanalysis is scapegoated, but intelligence is not impugned. I’m able to retain the crucial assumption: that there’s no better way to approach any problem than the way of intelligence. The source of illusion and failure-the source, ultimately, of that inner pain-is in ignorance and dogma; the locus of value is inquiry. The urgency is to have the freedom to see what is there to be seen.

This is the last stand of a rational man. From this position there can be no retreat. Lose this and the war’s over. It is also the strongest stand, for it lays claim to so little. Consider what assaults can be thrown back. A hundred thousand people die in Hiroshima: a great crime, to be sure, but not to be laid at the door of science. The evil issues from institutional anachronisms, such as the national state, which misuse the creations of science; with the further progress of knowledge in all areas of experience, such barbarism will give way. In this position I can survive, unthreatened, the despair of Marxist, Christian, mystic-even the most able and dedicated-for I can, in each case, say, “He gave his allegiance to a value which, however disguised, claims to be absolute. Such a value places itself beyond revision, is institutionalized, defended as dogma, becomes an incubus on man, and finally falls. Such disillusion is inevitable for the seekers after certainty. But I, the illusionless man, an immune. I have no platform, hold no value beyond change, believe only in intelligent inquiry.”

So I thought. Now I think this too will fall. Has fallen, I suppose. It’s still true, perhaps, but that’s not enough. For this position-like all the previous ones—is attempting, not just to be true but to diminish the elusive inner trouble. I can’t believe it any more. This malady is beyond the reach of anything. What I ascribe to intelligence is true, but this truth, too, has become irrelevant.
So what to do? What is a rational man to do-having lost faith in reason? The question trips itself. I don’t suppose it matters. I keep on working-not with hope, not with justification, but as a matter of taste. What else is there? Passivity, suicide, fleshpots. . . . I like the dignity of work. It has at least the merit of defiance, of shaking a fist at the heavens. But that’s just whimsy. Make a value out of that and it too will disappear.
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The Moralist
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Perhaps that man is social by nature. That even the most isolated of us lives in relatedness and interdependence. Alone in a locked room, despising men, one can’t read a book or eat an apple without becoming indebted to countless of the despised; the room itself was hammered together by them. Man is the animal who remembers the past, preserves it, adds to it, passes it on. To be a man, by definition, means to share in this relatedness, to give to it as well as take from it; and maybe the only source of morality for godless men is the free choice to be a man rather than a beast. For to elect diminished relatedness and participation, less responsibility, narrowed identifications, is to move toward the jungle.

Yet this, too, begs the question. For these alternatives offer no choice, but rationalize an antecedent choice. “Man or beast” means “man or sub-man,” which means “good or bad”; and to elect in this context to be a man means only to wish to be good, and that’s admirable indeed but establishes no basis for morals. Evil, however we conceive it, pursues its course in the lives of countless men who want to be good.

So why, we must ask, must relatedness, however characteristic of man, be identified with good? Cows and coyotes huddle together too. Even if we should accept that man is social in essence and even if we accept that his biological and historical development has tended ever toward more relatedness, larger groupings, wider and stronger identifications-even then we have no ground for morals; for we are talking only of what is, or was, or will be, not of what should be. Teilhard de Chardin, extending into evolutionary time man’s capacity for interrelatedness, foresaw the development of a universal mind, one all-embracing “envelope of thinking substance” covering the world. Let us grant this as a possibility but ask what reason have we for believing it good. Why should Teilhard’s man of the future, lacking unique mind, be viewed as superman rather than sub-man? Why, given a choice, should we not elect Nietzsche’s superman? Why not Jeff? .

I have wider and stronger social identifications than Jeff, am more concerned with the welfare of others. Am I thereby superior? Not, I am sure, to his view. Even were he to grant that the difference between us is so marked and so significant that, if I be man, he must be non-man, even then. . . “Don’t press me,” he would say, smiling with characteristic affection and lightness, but in his thoughts he would say, “Very well, if you insist: of the two of us, I am the superman. Because more free, less guilty, more able to live. I don’t think so much as you, nor probe morals, but I enjoy life more; and since from the vantage of the Horsehead Nebula in Orion neither you nor I nor anything we think matters a damn, pleasure is the only referent of value, and by that criterion I’m more advanced than you.” And how is this gainsaid?

Not by force of logic. By leap of heart, if at all.

I am in the fast lane, in a drizzle of rain at dusk; ahead of me, at a safe distance, a gray Mercedes convertible; beyond the convertible a trailer truck. The brake lights of the truck go on; the Mercedes slows; I slow; then the truck speeds on; the brake lights go off on the Mercedes. I put my foot back on the accelerator-then suddenly the convertible is broadside; my foot hits the brake; the blurred horizon spins. . . fast . . . faster . . . raindrops coming toward my eyes, remembering wife, child . . . oh, darling! I’m so sorry! . . . expecting the crash . . . a wild tearing roar of tires, a fountain of gravel rising by the window, the car coming then to a stop, without impact, upright, on an embankment. The Mercedes is not ten feet away, miraculously undamaged, facing the wrong way in the slow lane, a young woman with brown hair stumbling out. I catch her by the shoulders, pull her off the roadway, hold her, trembling, as she twists back as if searching, making then an inarticulate sound of distress and pointing: in the fast lane is a dog, hindquarters crushed (by the truck probably, and that’s why she tried to stop), struggling up on its forelegs, head straining upward, yelping feebly. I look up at four lanes of oncoming traffic-almost dark, faint streaks of rain slanting through the headlights-cars in the fast lane swerving outward to miss the dog, cars in the slow lane swerving inward to miss the Mercedes. The woman moves toward the road. “No,” I say, “don’t!” She twists toward me for a moment, her face frozen in horror and accusation, jerks away, runs for the road; hits me in the mouth as I catch her and pull her back, scratches at my eyes, screaming, “Coward! Coward! Let me go!” I pin her arms and we stand struggling in the rain, locked together, swaying, while the dog yelps; a car skids, a truck hits the dog, then a car with a thud, then another, and the dog is dead; the sirens then and flashing red lights and a police officer explaining that it’s the fault of the dog’s owner, who is liable, and who will be located from the tag on the dog’s collar.

I could never have made it, I tell myself later, driving on alone. But what if it had been a child? I would have tried. . . . Would I? I have an image of my own child, lying there, of my running out to her, of being hit in the third lane just a moment before I would have been able to scoop her up. But I might just make it, not altogether hopeless; I would try; it would be unthinkable not to try.
But there is a child, I think, just not so close as that dog. So the woman is right, and I am a coward. And it seems to me that somewhere, at some forgotten corner, I made a wrong turn-away from the real world that had seemed to betray me, to look inward, to burrow ever more deeply within, coming to live with shadows, the real world lost to me now, no sureness in it, not even knowing where the fast lane is.

The Meditative Mind: The Varieties of Meditative Experience – Daniel Goleman

Part one
The Visuddhimagga: A Map for Inner Space
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1. Preparation for Meditation
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Because a controlled mind is the goal of purity, restraint of the senses is part of purification. The means for this is sati(mindfulness). In mindfulness, control of the senses comes through cultivating the habit of simply noticing sensory perceptions, not allowing them to stimulate the mind into thought chains of reaction. Mindfulness is the attitude of paying sensory stimuli only the barest attention. When systematically developed into the practice of vipassana (seeing things as they are), mindfulness becomes the avenue to the nirvanic state. In daily practice, mindfulness leads to detachment toward the meditator’s own perceptions and thoughts. He becomes an onlooker to his stream of consciousness, weakening the pull to normal mental activity and so preparing the way to altered states.

In the initial stages, before firm grounding in mindfulness, the meditator is distracted by his surroundings. The Visuddhimagga accordingly gives instructions to the would-be meditator for the optimum life-style and setting. He must engage in “right livelihood” so that the source of his financial support will not be cause for misgivings; in the case of monks, professions such as astrology, palm reading, and dream interpretation are expressly forbidden, while the life of a mendicant is recommended. Possessions should be kept to a minimum; a monk is to possess only eight articles: three robes, a belt, a begging bowl, a razor, a sewing needle, and sandals. He should take food in moderation, enough to ensure physical health but less than would make for drowsiness. His dwelling should be aloof from the world, a place of solitude; for householders who cannot live in isolation, a room should be set aside for meditation. Undue concern for the body should be avoided, but in case of sickness, the meditator should obtain appropriate medicine. In acquiring the four requisites of possessions, food, dwelling, and medicine, the meditator should get only what is necessary to his well-being. In getting these requisites, he should act without greed, so that even his material necessities will be untainted by impurity.

Since one’s own state of mind is affected by the state of mind of one’s associates, the serious meditator should surround himself with like-minded people. This is one advantage of sanghas, narrowly defined as those who have attained the nirvanic state and, in its widest sense, the community of people on the path. Meditation is helped by the company of mindful or concentrated persons and is harmed by those who are agitated, distracted, and immersed in worldly concerns. Agitated, worldly people are likely to talk in a way that does not lead to detachment, dispassion, or tranquility, qualities the meditator seeks to cultivate. The sort of topics typical of worldly, unprofitable talk are enumerated by the Buddha as (Nyanaponika Thera, 1962: p. 172)

about kings, thieves, ministers, armies, famine, and war; about eating, drinking, clothing and lodging; about garlands, perfumes, relatives, vehicles, cities and countries; about women and wine, the gossip of the street and well; about ancestors and various trifles; tales about the origin of the world, talk about things being so or otherwise, and similar matters.

At later stages, the meditator may find to be obstacles what once were aids. The Visuddhimagga lists ten categories of potential attachments, all hindrances to progress in meditation: (1) any fixed dwelling place if its upkeep is the cause of worry, (2) family, if their welfare causes concern, (3) accruing gifts or reputation that involves spending time with admirers, (4) a following of students or being busy with teaching, (5) projects, having “something to do,” (6) traveling about, (7) people dear to one whose needs demand attention, (8) illness necessitating undergoing treatment, (9) theoretical studies unaccompanied by practice, and (10)supernormal psychic powers, the practice of which becomes more interesting than meditation. Release from these obligations frees the meditator for single-minded pursuit of meditation: This is “purification” in the sense of freeing the mind from worrisome matters. The life of the monk is designed for this kind of freedom; for the layman, short retreats allow a temporary reprieve.

These ascetic practices are optional in the “middle way” of the Buddha. The serious monk can practice them, should he find any of them helpful. But he must be discreet in their observance, doing them so that they will not attract undue attention. These practices include wearing only robes made of rags; eating only one bowl of food, and just once a day; living in the forest under a tree; dwelling in a cemetery or in the open; sitting up throughout the night. Though optional, the Buddha praises those who follow these modes of living “for the sake of frugality, contentedness, austerity, detachment,” while criticizing those who pride themselves on practicing austerities and look down on others who do not. In all facets of training, spiritual pride mars purity. Any gains from asceticism are lost in pride. The goal of purification is simply a mind unconcerned with externals, calm and ripe for meditation.
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2. The Path of Concentration

In describing the path of concentration, the Visuddhimagga map suffers from a serious oversight: It begins with the description of an advanced altered state, one that many or most meditators may never once experience. It skips the ordinary-and much more common-preliminary stages. This gap can be filled from other Buddhist sources, which start with the meditator’s normal state of mind rather than with the rarefied states the Visuddhimagga elaborates in detail.

At the outset, the meditator’s focus wanders from the object of meditation. As he notices he has wandered, he returns his awareness to the proper focus. His one-pointedness is occasional, coming in fits and starts. His mind oscillates between the object of meditation and distracting thoughts, feelings, and sensations. The first landmark in concentration comes when the meditator’s mind is unaffected both by outer distractions, such as nearby sounds, and by the turbulence of his own assorted thoughts and feelings. Although sounds are heard, and his thoughts and feelings are noticed, they do not disturb the meditator.

In the next stage, his mind focuses on the object for prolonged periods. The meditator gets better at repeatedly returning his wandering mind to the object. His ability to return his attention gradually increases as the meditator sees the ill results of distractions (e.g., agitation) and feels the advantages of a calm one-pointedness. As this happens, the meditator is able to overcome mental habits antagonistic to calm collectedness, such as boredom due to hunger for novelty. By now, the meditator’s mind can remain undistracted for long periods.

On the Verge of Absorption

In the early stages of meditation, there is a tension between concentration on the object of meditation and distracting thoughts. The main distractions are sensual desires; ill will, despair, and anger; laziness and torpor; agitation and worry; and doubt and skepticism. With much practice, a moment comes when these hindrances are wholly subdued. There is then a noticeable quickening of concentration. At this moment, the mental attributes, such as one-pointedness and bliss, that will mature into full absorption simultaneously come into dominance. Each has been present previously to different degrees, but when they come, all at once they have special power. This is the first noteworthy attainment in concentrative meditation; because it is the state verging on full absorption, it is called “access” concentration.

This state of concentration is like a child not yet able to stand steady but always trying to do so. The mental factors of full absorption are not strong at the access level; their emergence is precarious, and the mind fluctuates between them and its inner speech, the usual ruminations and wandering thoughts. The meditator is still open to his senses and remains aware of surrounding noises and his body’s feelings. The meditation subject is a dominant thought but does not yet fully occupy the mind. At this access level, strong feelings of zest or rapture emerge, along with happiness, pleasure, and equanimity. There is also fleeting attention to the meditation subject as though striking at it, or more sustained focus on it, repeatedly noting it. Sometimes there are luminous shapes or flashes of bright light, especially if the meditation subject is a kasina or respiration. There may also be a sensation of lightness, as though the body were floating in the air. Access concentration is a precarious attainment. If not solidified into fuller absorption at the same sitting, it must be protected between sessions by avoiding distracting actions or encounters.
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3. The Path of Insight

The Visuddhimagga sees mastery of the jhanas and tasting their sublime bliss as of secondary importance to punna, discriminating wisdom. Jhana mastery is part of a fully rounded training, but its advantages for the meditator are in making his mind wieldy and pliable, so speeding his training in punna. Indeed, the deeper jhanas are sometimes referred to in Pali, the language of the Visuddhimagga, as “concentration games,” the play of well-advanced meditators. But the crux of his training is a path that need not include the jhanas. This path begins with mindfulness (satipatthana), proceeds through insight (vipassana), and ends in nirvana.

Mindfulness

The first phase, mindfulness, entails breaking through stereotyped perception. Our natural tendency is to become habituated to the world around us, no longer to notice the familiar. We also substitute abstract names or preconceptions for the raw evidence of our senses. In mindfulness, the meditator methodically faces the bare facts of his experience, seeing each event as though occurring for the first time. He does this by continuous attention to the first phase of perception, when his mind is receptive rather than reactive. He restricts his attention to the bare notice of his senses and thoughts. He attends to these as they arise in any of the five senses or in his mind, which, in the Visuddhimagga, constitutes a sixth sense. While attending to his sense impressions, the meditator keeps reaction simply to registering whatever he observes. If any further comment, judgment, or reflection arises in the meditator’s mind, these are themselves made the focus of bare attention. They are neither repudiated nor pursued but simply dismissed after being noted. The essence of mindfulness is, in the words of Nyanaponika Thera, a modem Buddhist monk, “the clear and single-minded awareness of what actually happens to us and in us, at the successive moments of perception.”

Whatever power of concentration the meditator has developed previously helps him in the thorough pursuit of mindfulness. One-pointedness is essential in adopting this new habit of bare perception. The best level of jhana for practicing mindfulness is the lowest, that of access. This is because mindfulness is applied to normal consciousness, and from the first jhana on, these normal processes cease. A level of concentration less than that of access, on the other hand, can be easily overshadowed by wandering thoughts and lapses in mindfulness. At the access level, there is a desirable balance: Perception and thought retain their usual patterns, but concentration is powerful enough to keep the meditator’s awareness being diverted from steadily noting these patterns. The moments of entry to or exit from jhana are especially ripe for practicing insight. The mind’s workings are transparent in these moments, making them more vulnerable to the dear gaze of the mindful meditator.

The preferred method for cultivating mindfulness is to precede it with training in the jhanas. There is, however, a method called “bare insight” in which the meditator begins mindfulness without any previous success in concentration. In bare insight, concentration strengthens through the practice of mindfulness itself. During the first stages of bare insight, the meditator’s mind is intermittently interrupted by wandering thoughts between moments of mindful noticing. Sometimes the meditator notices the wandering, sometimes not. But momentary concentration gradually strengthens as more stray thoughts are noted. Wandering thoughts subside as soon as noticed, and the meditator resumes mindfulness immediately afterward. Finally, the meditator reaches the point at which his mind is unhindered by straying. When he notices every movement of the mind without break, this is the same as access concentration.

Kinds of Mindfulness

There are four kinds of mindfulness, identical in function but different in focus. Mindfulness can focus on the body, on feelings, on the mind, or on mind objects. Anyone of these serves as a fixed point for bare attention to the stream of consciousness. In mindfulness of the body, the meditator attends to each moment of his bodily activity, such as his posture and the movements of his limbs. The meditator notes his body’s motion and position regardless of what he does. The aims of his act are disregarded; the focus is on the bodily act itself. In mindfulness of feeling, the meditator focuses on his internal sensations, disregarding whether they are pleasant or unpleasant. He simply notes all his internal feelings as they come to his attention. Some feelings are the first reaction to messages from the senses, some are physical feelings accompanying psychological states, some are byproducts of biological processes. Whatever the source, the feeling itself is registered.

In mindfulness of mental states, the meditator focuses on each state as it comes to awareness. Whatever mood, mode of thought, or psychological state presents itself, he simply registers it as such. If, for instance, there is anger at a disturbing noise, at that moment he simply notes “anger.” The fourth technique, mindfulness of mind objects, is virtually the same as the one just described save for the level at which the mind’s workings are observed. Rather than noting the quality of mental states as they arise, the meditator notes the attentional objects that occupy those states, for example, “disturbing noise.” As each thought arises, the meditator notes it in terms of a detailed schema for classifying mental content. The broadest category on this list labels all thoughts as either hindrances to or helps toward enlightenment.

Any of these techniques of mindfulness will break through the illusions of continuity and reasonableness that sustain our mental life. In mindfulness, the meditator begins to witness the random units of mind stuff from which his reality is built. From these observations emerge a series of realizations about the nature of the mind. With these realizations, mindfulness matures into insight.

Beginning of Insight

The practice of insight begins at the point when mindfulness continues without lag. In insight meditation, awareness fixes on its object so that the contemplating mind and its object arise together in unbroken succession. This point marks the beginning of a chain of insights–mind knowing itself ending in the nirvanic state.

The first realization in insight is that the phenomena contemplated are distinct from mind contemplating them: Within the mind, the faculty whereby mind witnesses its own workings is different from the workings it witnesses. The meditator knows awareness is distinct from the objects it takes, but this knowledge is not at the verbal level as it is expressed here. Rather, the meditator knows this and each ensuing realization in his direct experience. He may have no words for his realizations; he understands but cannot necessarily state that understanding.

Continuing his practice of insight, after the meditator has realized the separate nature of awareness and its objects, he can, with further insight, gain a clear understanding that these dual processes are devoid of self. He sees that they arise as effects of their respective causes, not as the result of direction by any individual agent. Each moment of awareness goes according to its own nature, regardless of “one’s will.” It becomes certain to the meditator that nowhere in the mind can any abiding entity be detected. This is direct experience of the Buddhist doctrine of anatta, literally “not self,” that all phenomena have no indwelling personality. This includes even “one’s self.” The meditator sees his past and future life as merely a conditioned cause-effect process. He no longer doubts whether the “I” really exists; he knows “I am” to be a misconception. He realizes the truth of the words of the Buddha in the Pali Canon:

Just as when the parts are set together There arises the word “chariot,”
So does the notion of a being When the aggregates are present.

Continuing to practice insight, the meditator finds that his witnessing mind and its objects come and go at a frequency beyond his ken. He sees his whole field of awareness in continual flux. The meditator realizes that his world of reality is renewed every mind moment in an endless chain. With this realization, he knows the truth of impermanence (Pali: anicca) in the depths of his being.
Finding that these phenomena arise and pass away at every moment, the meditator comes to see them as neither pleasant nor reliable. Disenchantment sets in: What is constantly changing cannot be the basis for any lasting satisfaction. As the meditator realizes his private reality to be devoid of self and ever changing, he is led to a state of detachment from his world of experience. From this detached perspective, the impermanent and impersonal qualities of his mind lead him to see it as a source of suffering (Pali: dukkha).

Pseudonirvana: The “Ten Corruptions”

The meditator then continues without any further reflections. After these realizations, the meditator begins to see clearly the beginning and end of each successive moment of awareness. With this clarity of perception, there may occur:
• the vision of a brilliant light or luminous form
• rapturous feelings that cause goose flesh, tremor in the limbs, the sensation of levitation, and the other attributes of rapture
• tranquility in mind and body, making them light, plastic, and wieldy
• devotional feelings toward and faith in the meditation teacher, the Buddha, his teachings-including the method of insight itself-and the sangha, accompanied by joyous confidence in the virtues of meditation and the desire to advise friends and relatives to practice it
• vigor in meditating, with a steady energy neither too lax nor too tense
• sublime happiness suffusing the meditator’s body, an unprecedented bliss that seems never-ending and motivates him to tell others of this extraordinary experience
• quick and clear perception of each moment of awareness: Noticing is keen, strong, and lucid, and the characteristics of impermanence, nonself, and unsatisfactoriness are clearly understood at once.
• strong mindfulness so the meditator effortlessly notices every successive moment of awareness; mindfulness gains a momentum of its own
• equanimity toward whatever comes into awareness: No matter what comes into his mind, the meditator maintains a detached neutrality.
• a subtle attachment to the lights and other factors listed here and pleasure in their contemplation

The meditator is often elated at the emergence of these ten signs and may speak of them thinking he has attained enlightenment and finished the task of meditation. Even if he does not think they mark his liberation, he may pause to bask in their enjoyment. For this reason, this stage, called “Knowledge of Arising and Passing Away,” is subtitled in the Visuddhimagga “The Ten Corruptions of Insight.” It is a pseudonirvana. The great danger for the meditator is in “mistaking what is not the Path for the Path” or, in lieu of that, faltering in the further pursuit of insight because of his attachment to these phenomena. Finally, the meditator, either on his own or through advice from his teacher, realizes these experiences to be a landmark along the way rather than his final destination. At this point, he turns the focus of insight on them and on his own attachment to them.

Higher Realizations

As this pseudonirvana gradually diminishes, the meditator’s perception of each moment of awareness becomes clearer. He can make increasingly fine discrimination of successive moments until his perception is flawless. As his perception quickens, the ending of each moment of awareness is more clearly perceived than its arising. Finally, the meditator perceives each moment only as it vanishes. He experiences contemplating mind and its object as vanishing in pairs at every moment. The meditator’s world of reality is in a constant state of dissolution. A dreadful realization flows from this; the mind becomes gripped with fear. All his thoughts seem fearsome. He sees becoming, that is, thoughts coming into being, as a source of terror. To the meditator everything that enters his awareness–even what might once have been very pleasant-now seems oppressive. He is helpless to avoid this oppression; it is part of every moment.

At this point, the meditator realizes the unsatisfactory quality of all phenomena. The slightest awareness he sees as utterly destitute of any possible satisfaction. In them is nothing but danger. The meditator comes to feel that in all the kinds of becoming there is not a single thing that he can place his hopes in or hold onto. All of his awareness, every thought, every feeling, appears insipid. This includes any state of mind the meditator can conceive. In all the meditator perceives, he sees only suffering and misery.
Feeling this misery in all phenomena, the meditator becomes entirely disgusted with them. Though he continues with the practice of insight, his mind is dominated by feelings of discontent and listlessness toward all its own contents. Even the thought of the happiest sort of life or the most desirable objects seem unattractive and boring. He becomes absolutely dispassionate and adverse toward the multitude of mental stuff-to any kind of becoming, destiny, or state of consciousness.
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Part Two
Meditation Paths: A Survey
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14. Krishnamurti’s Choiceless Awareness

J. Krishnamurti, born in South India in the 18905, was educated in England under the guidance of theosophist Annie Besant. Krishnamurti’ s view of the human predicament is close to that of Buddhism. The mind and the world, says Krishnamurti, are in everlasting flux: “There is only one fact, impermanence.” The human mind clings to a “me” in the face of the insecurity of this flux. But the “me” exists only through identification with what it imagines it has been and wants to be. The “me” is “a mass of contradictions, desires, pursuits, fulfillments and frustrations, with sorrow outweighing joy.” One source of sorrow is the constant mental conflict between “what is” and “what should be.” The conditioned mind, in Krishnamurti’s analysis, flees from the facts of its impermanence, its emptiness, and its sorrow. It builds walls of habit and repetition, and pursues its dreams of the future or clings to that which has been. These defenses paralyze us. They keep us from living in the present moment.

Krishnamurti objects to methods of meditation, the solution so many others advocate. While the mind may try to escape from conditioning through meditation, Krishnamurti says, it simply creates in the very attempt another prison of methods to follow and goals to achieve. He opposes techniques of every kind and urges the putting aside of all authority and tradition: From them, one can only collect more knowledge, while understanding is needed instead. According to Krishnamurti, no technique can free the mind, for any effort by the mind only weaves another net. He, for example, emphatically opposes concentration methods (quoted in Coleman, 1971: p. 114):

By repeating Amen or Om or Coca-Cola indefinitely you obviously have a certain experience because by repetition the mind becomes quiet . . . It is one of the favorite gambits of some teachers of meditation to insist on their pupils learning concentration, that is, fixing the mind on one thought and driving out all other thoughts. This is a most stupid, ugly thing, which any schoolboy can do because he is forced to.

The “meditation” Krishnamurti advocates has no system, least of all “repetition and imitation.” He proposes as both means and end a “choiceless awareness,” the “experiencing of what is without naming.” This state is beyond thought; all thought, he says, belongs to the past, and meditation is always in the present. To be in the present, the mind must relinquish the habits acquired out of the urge to be secure; “its gods and virtues must be given back to the society which bred them.” One must let go all thought and all imagining. Advises Krishnamurti (1962: pp. 8-10):

Let the mind be empty, and not filled with the things of the mind. Then there is only meditation, and not a meditator who is meditating . . . the mind caught in imagination can only breed delusions. The mind must be clear, without movement, and in the light of that clarity the timeless is revealed.

Krishnamurti seems to advocate an end state only, a methodless method. But on closer scrutiny, he directly tells all who might hear the “how,” while at the same time he insists that “there is no how; no method.” He instructs us ‘Just to be aware of all this . . . of your own habits, responses.” His means is constantly watching one’s own awareness. Krishnamurti’s “nontechnique” is more clear from his instructions to a group of young Indian schoolchildren. He first told them to sit still with eyes closed and then to watch the progression of their thoughts. He urged them to continue this exercise at other times, including when walking or in bed at night:

You have to watch, as you watch a lizard going by, walking across the wall, seeing all its four feet, how it sticks to the wall, you have to watch it, and as you watch, you see all the movements, the delicacy of its movements. So in the same way, watch your thinking, do not correct it, do not suppress it-do not say it is too hard-just watch it, now, this morning.

He calls this careful attention “self-knowledge.” Its essence is “to perceive the ways of your own mind” so that the mind is “free to be still.” When the mind is still, one understands. The key to understanding is “attention without the word, the name.” He instructs, “Look and be simple”: Where there is attention without reactive thought, reality IS.

The process Krishnamurti proposes for self-knowledge duplicates mindfulness training. But Krishnamurti himself would most likely not condone this comparison because of the danger he sees inherent in seeking any goal through a technique. The process he suggests for stilling the mind springs spontaneously from the realization of one’s predicament, for to know “that you have been asleep is already an awakened state.” This truth, he insists, acts on the mind, setting it free. Krishnamurti (1962: p. 60) assures us:

When the mind realizes the totality of its own conditioning . . . then all its movements come to an end: It is completely still, without any desire, without any compulsion, without any motive.

This awakening is for Krishnamurti an automatic process. The mind discovers, rather, is caught up in, the solution “through the very intensity of the question itself.” This realization cannot be sought: “It comes uninvited.” Should one somehow experience the realization of which Krishnamurti speaks, he assures us that a new state would emerge. In this state, one is freed from conditioned habits of perception and cognition, devoid of self. To be in this state, says Krishnamurti, is to love: “Where the self is, love is not.” This state brings an “aloneness beyond loneliness” in which there is no movement within the mind, rather a pure experiencing, “attention without motive.” One is free from envy, ambition, and the desire for power, and loves with compassion. Here feeling is knowing, in a state of total attention with no watcher. Living in the eternal present, one ceases collecting impressions or experiences; the past dies for one at each moment. With this choiceless awareness, one is free to be simple; as Krishnamurti (Coleman, 1971: p. 95) puts it:

Be far away, far away from the world of chaos and misery, live in it, untouched . . . The meditative mind is unrelated to the past and to the future and yet is sanely capable of living with clarity and reason.

Part Three
Meditation Paths: Their Essential Unity
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15. Preparation for Meditation

There is the least common ground among meditation systems on the preparatory groundwork the meditator requires. The systems surveyed here represent the full spectrum of attitudes toward the meditator’s need to prepare himself through some kind of purification. They range from the emphatic insistence on purification as a prelude to meditation voiced in the Bhakti, Kabbalist, Christian, and Sufi traditions to the views of Gurdjieff and Krishnamurti that such efforts are pointless if they entail avoiding normal life situations. Finally, there is the notion among, for example, TM and Zen schools that genuine purity arises spontaneously as a by-product of meditation itself. Tantrics of the Bon Margmark an extreme attitude toward purity in advocating the violation of sexual and other proprieties as part of spiritual practice.

Ideas about the best setting for meditation likewise cover a full spectrum. The Desert Fathers withdrew into the Egyptian wilderness to avoid the marketplace and worldly company; hermetic solitude was essential to their program of severe self-discipline. Modern Indian yogis seek out isolated mountains and jungle retreats for the same reasons. Westernized versions of Indian yoga such as TM, however, oppose any forced change in the meditator’s living habits; instead, meditation is simply inserted into an otherwise normal daily agenda. Intensive Zen practice is done ideally in a monastic setting, but, like TM, it can be part of a meditator’s normal daily round. Both Gurdjieff and Krishnamurti are emphatic that the settings of family, work, and the marketplace are the best context for inner discipline, providing the raw material for meditation.

In most classical meditation systems, however, a monastery or ashram is the optimal environment for meditation, monks or yogis the ideal companions, the role of the renunciate the highest calling, and scriptures the best reading. Modem systems such as TM direct the student to organizational ties and activities while he lives his ordinary life-style without imposing any major change. Krishnamurti stands alone among spiritual spokesmen in not advocating that the aspirant seek out the company of others on the same path, just as he objects to the aspirant’s looking for guidance from a teacher or master-essential elements in every other system.

In propagating no explicit doctrine, Krishnamurti is again unique. Though other schools such as Zen de-emphasize intellectual study, they all have both formal and informal teachings that students assimilate. In some traditions, formal study is a major emphasis: The Benedictine monk, for example, is to spend one-third of his day in study, the other two-thirds in prayer (or meditation) and manual labor.

16. Attention

The strongest agreement among meditation schools is on the importance of retraining attention. All these systems can be broadly categorized in terms of the major strategies for retraining attention described in the Visuddhimagga: concentration or mindfulness. By using the Visuddhimagga map as an example, we can see similarities of technique obscured by the overlay of jargon and ideology.

The differing names used among meditation systems to describe one and the same way and destination are legion. Sometimes the same term is used in special but very different technical senses by various schools. What translates into the English word “void,” for example, is used by Indian yogis to refer to jhana states and by Mahayana Buddhists to signify the realization of the essential emptiness of all phenomenon. The former usage denotes a mental state devoid of contents (e.g., the formless jhanas); the latter refers to the voidness of phenomenon. Another example: Phillip Kapleau (1967) distinguishes between zazen and meditation, saying that the two “are not to be confused”; Krishnamurti (1962) says only “choiceless awareness” is really meditation. The recognition that both zazen and choiceless awareness are insight techniques allows one to see that these seemingly unrelated remarks are actually emphasizing the same distinction: that between concentration and insight. By “meditation,” Kapleau means concentration, while Krishnamurti denies that concentration practices are within the province of meditation at all.

The criterion for classification is the mechanics of technique: (a) concentration,in which mind focuses on a fixed mental object; (b) mindfulness, in which mind observes itself; or (c) both operations present in integrated combination.

A second prerequisite for classification is internal consistency in descriptions. If it is a concentration technique, other characteristics of the jhana path are mentioned-for example, increasingly subtle bliss accompanying deepened concentration or loss of sense-consciousness. If it is an insight technique, other characteristics of insight practices, such as the realization of the impersonality of mental processes, must be present. If a combined technique, both concentration techniques as well as insight must be mixed and integrated, as in Theravadan vipassana.

In concentration, the meditator’s attentional strategy is to fix his focus on a single percept, constantly bringing back his wandering mind to this object. Some instructions for doing so emphasize an active assertion of the meditator’s will to stick with the target percept and resist any wandering. Others suggest a passive mode of simply regenerating the target percept when it is lost in the flow of awareness. Thus, an ancient Theravadan text exhorts the meditator to grit his teeth, clench his fists, and work up a sweat, struggling to keep his mind fixed on the movements of his respiration; a TM meditator, on the other hand, is told “easily start the mantra” each time he notices his mind has wandered. Though these approaches are opposite on a continuum of activity-passivity, they are equivalent means to constantly reorient to a single object of concentration and so develop one-pointedness. With mindfulness techniques whether Gurdjieff’s “self-remembering,” Krishnamurti’ s “self-knowledge,” or zazen’s “shikan-taza” – the attentional fundamentals are identical. They all entail continuous, full watchfulness of each successive moment, a global vigilance to the meditator’s chain of awareness.
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Part Four
The Psychology of Meditation
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Mental Factors.
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Body and mind are seen as interconnected in Abhidhamma. While every factor affects both body and mind, the final set of healthy factors are the only ones explicitly described as having both physical and psychological effects. These are buoyancy (ahuta), pliancy (muduta), adaptability (kammannata), and proficiency (pagunnata). When these factors arise a person thinks and acts with a natural looseness and ease, performing at the peak of his or her skills. They suppress the unhealthy factors of contraction and torpor, which dominate the mind in such states as depression. These healthy factors make one able to adapt physically and mentally to changing conditions, meeting whatever challenges may arise.

In the Abhidhamma psychodynamic, healthy and unhealthy mental factors are mutually inhibiting; the presence of one suppresses its opposite. But there is not always a one-to-one correspondence between a pair of healthy and unhealthy factors; in some cases a single healthy factor will inhibit a set of unhealthy factors-nonattachment alone, for example, inhibits greed, avarice, envy, and aversion. Certain key factors will inhibit the entire opposite set; for example, when delusion is present, not a single positive factor can arise along with it.

It is a person’s kamma that determines whether he or she will experience predominantly healthy or unhealthy states. The particular combination of factors are the outcome of biological and situational influences as well as the carryover from one’s previous states of mind. The factors usually arise as a group, either positive or negative. In any given mental state the factors composing it arise in differing strengths; whichever factor is the strongest determines how a person experiences and acts at any given moment.

Although all the negative factors may be present, the state experienced will be quite different depending on whether, for example, it is greed or torpor that dominates the mind. The hierarchy of strength of the factors, then, determines whether a specific state will be negative or positive. When a particular factor or set of factors occurs frequently in a person’s mental states, then it becomes a personality trait. The sum total of a person’s habitual mental factors determines their personality type.

Personality Types

The Abhidhamma model for personality types follows directly from the principle that mental factors arise in differing strengths. If a person’s mind is habitually dominated by a particular factor or set of factors, these will determine personality, motives, and behavior. The uniqueness of each person’s pattern of mental factors gives rise to individual differences in personality over and above the broad categories of the main types. The person in whom delusion predominates is one of the common types, as are the hateful person, in whom aversion predominates, and the lustful person, in whom greed is strong. A more positive type is the intelligent person, in whom mindfulness and insight are strong.

The Abhidhamma view of human motivation stems from its analysis of mental factors and their influence on behavior. It is a person’s mental states that move the person to seek one thing and avoid another. His or her mental states guide every act. If the mind is dominated by greed, then this will become the predominant motive, and one will behave accordingly, seeking to gain the object of one’s greed. If egoism is a powerful factor, then the person will act in a self-aggrandizing manner. Each personality type is, in this sense, a motivational type also.

The Visuddhimagga devotes a section to recognizing the main personality types, since each kind of person must be treated in a way that suits his or her disposition. One method it recommends for evaluating personality type is careful observation of how a person stands and moves. The lustful or sensual person, for example, is said to be graceful in gait; the hateful person drags the feet as he or she walks; the deluded person paces quickly. A typical rule of thumb for this analysis goes (Vajiranana, 1962, p. 99):

Of the lustful the footprint is divided in the middle,
Of unfriendly man it leaves a trail behind.
The print of the deluded one is an impression quickly made . . .

It goes on to note that a Buddha leaves a perfectly even footprint, since his mind is calm and his body poised.

The author of the Visuddhimagga recognized that every detail of life is a clue to character; this fifth-century manual gives a remarkably complete behavioral profile for each personality type. The sensual person, it tells us, is charming, polite, and replies courteously when addressed. When such persons sleep, they make their beds carefully, lie down gently, and move little while asleep. They perform their duties artistically; sweep with smooth and even strokes, and do a thorough job. In general they are skillful, polished, tidy, and circumspect workers. They dress neatly and tastefully. When they eat they prefer soft, sweet food that is well cooked and served in sumptuous fashion; they eat slowly, take small bites, and relish the taste. On seeing any pleasing object they stop to admire it, and are attracted by its merits, but do not notice its faults. They leave such an object with regret. But on the negative side they are often pretentious, deceitful, vain, covetous, dissatisfied, lascivious, and frivolous.

The hateful person, by contrast, stands stiffly. These persons make their bed carelessly and in haste, sleep with their bodies tense, and reply in anger when awakened. When they work they are rough and careless; when they sweep the broom makes a harsh, scraping noise. Their clothes are likely to be too tight and unfinished. When they eat their preference is for pungent food that tastes sharp and sour; they eat hurriedly without noticing the taste, though they dislike food with a mild taste. They are uninterested in objects of beauty, and notice even the slightest fault while overlooking merits. They are often angry, full of malice, ungrateful, envious, and mean.

The third type is distinct from these two. The deluded person stands in a slovenly manner. Their beds are untidy, they sleep in a sprawl, and arise sluggishly, grunting with complaints. As workers they are unskillful and messy; they sweep awkwardly and at random, leaving bits of rubbish behind. Their clothes are loose and untidy. They do not care what they eat, and will eat whatever comes their way; they are sloppy eaters, putting large lumps of food in the mouth and smearing the face with food. They have no idea whether an object is beautiful or not, but believe whatever others tell them, and so praise or disapprove accordingly. They often show sloth and torpor, are easily distracted, are given to remorse and perplexity, but can also be obstinant and tenacious.

The Visuddhimagga goes on to specify the optimal conditions that should be arranged for persons of each type when they begin to meditate. The first goal in their training is to counteract their dominant psychological tendencies, and so bring their mind into balance. For this reason the conditions prescribed for each type are not those they would naturally choose. The cottage given to the sensual person, for example, is an unwashed grass hut that ought to be “spattered with din, full of bats, dilapidated, too high or too low, in bleak surroundings, threatened by lions and tigers, with a muddy, uneven path, where even the bed and chair are full of bugs. And it should be ugly and unsightly, exciting loathing as soon as looked at” (p. 109). The Visuddhimagga details the other conditions that suit the sensual person (Buddhaghosa, 1976, pp. 109-110):

Suitable garments have torn-off edges with threads hanging down, harsh to the touch like hemp, soiled, heavy and hard to wear. And the right kind of bowl for him is an ugly clay bowl or a heavy and misshappen iron bowl as unappetising as a skull. The right kind of road for him on which to wander for alms is disagreeable, with no village near, and uneven. The right kind of village for him is where people wander about as if oblivious of him. Suitable people to serve him are unsightly, ill-favoured, with dirty clothes, ill-smelling and disgusting, who serve him his gruel and rice as if they were throwing it rudely at him. The right kind of food is made of broken rice, stale buttermilk, sour gruel, curry of old vegetables, or anything at all that is merely for filling the stomach.

The suitable conditions for the hateful person, on the other hand, are as pleasant, comfortable, and easy as can be arranged. For the deluded person, things are to be made simple and clear, and quite as pleasant and comfortable as for the hateful person. In each case the environment is tailored to inhibit the kind of mental factor that usually dominates each personality type: the lustful person finds little to be greedy about, the hateful person little to despise, and for the deluded person things are clear. This program of environments designed to promote mental health is an ancient predecessor to what modem advocates of similar plans call “milieu therapy.” The Buddha also saw that different types of people would take more readily to different kinds of meditation, and so he devised a wide variety of meditation methods tailored to fit different personality types.
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Meditation and Flow: Living in the Tao

The arahat, it is said, at all times and in every circumstance experiences an internal state of calm delight, is keenly attentive to all important aspects of the situation, and exhibits “skillful means” in response to the requirements of the moment. A similar state has been described in contemporary psychology by Csikzentmihalyi (1978), who has studied a broad range of intrinsically rewarding activities, all of which are marked by a similar experience, which he calls “flow.”

The key elements of flow are: (a) the merging of action and awareness in sustained concentration on the task at hand, (b) the focusing of attention in a pure involvement without concern for outcome, (c) self-forgetfulness with heightened awareness of the activity, (d) skills adequate to meet the environmental demand, and (e) clarity regarding situational cues and appropriate response. Flow arises when there is an optimal fit between one’s capability and the demands of the moment. The flow range is bordered on the one hand by anxiety-inducing situations where demand exceeds capability, and on the other hand by boredom where capability far exceeds demand.

In a related work Hartmann (1973) proposes a pattern of “inhibitory sharpening” in cortical arousal patterning, which represents optimal specificity of brain response to environmental demand. Focused attention entails clearly demarcated small areas of cortical excitation surrounded by areas of inhibition.

When blurring occurs in the brain’s demarcation of excitation and inhibition, there is a “spillover” of arousal to brain areas irrelevant to the task at hand. This, proposes Hartmann, characterizes a less balanced, less delicately adjusted cortical functioning, as is found during tiredness. Such an excitation “spillover” may also occur in acute anxiety, and may account for the lessened ability to perceive and respond in anxiety states. Finely tuned cortical specificity, on the other hand, characterizes well-rested waking functioning, allowing flexibility in meeting environmental demands with skilled response. This should be one aspect of the neurophysiologic substrate of flow.

As I interpret the flow model in terms of neurophysiology, Hartmann’s formulation points up a significant characteristic of flow: It requires both precision and fluidity in neurologic patterning, so that activation can change tailored to fluctuating situational requirements. The flow state is not a given pattern of ongoing arousal; it demands state-flexibility. The person who is chronically anxious, or habitually locked into any given configuration of arousal, is likely to confront more situations where his internal state is inappropriate for optimal fit with environmental demands-that is, non-flow. Changing circumstances require changing internal states.

There are two ways of increasing the likelihood of a flow experience: regulating environmental challenge to fit one’s skills, as in games, or self-regulation of internal capacities to meet a greater variation in external demands. I propose that meditation may be a functional equivalent of the latter strategy, producing a change in internal state which could maximize possibilities for flow.
“Some people,” notes Csikzentmihalyi, “enter flow simply by directing their awareness so as to limit the stimulus field in a way that allows the merging of action and awareness” -namely, attentional focus with the exclusion of distracting stimuli. This is identical to the basic skill practiced in meditation: it is the essential core of every meditative discipline (though techniques may vary according to the degree of attentional effort expended).

A constellation of findings on the enduring effects of meditation suggests a spectrum of changes, which include perceptual sharpening and increased ability to attend to a target stimulus while ignoring irrelevant stimuli; increased cortical specificity-that is, arousal of the cortical area appropriate to a given task with relative inhibition of irrelevant cortical zones, a pattern underlying skilled response; increased situation-specific cortical arousability with limbic inhibition; autonomic stability and lowering of anxiety level; and equanimity and evenness in responding to emotionally loaded and threatening stimuli.

To the extent that these diverse findings are true for any individual meditator, these traits should operate so as to lower the threshold for entering flow by bringing into its domain those instances where flow would otherwise have been excluded by misperception, distractability, arousal states unsuited to specific requirements, or functioning impaired by anxiety. As the range of flow and its sense of the intrinsic rewards of activity expands, there would be a concomitant shrinkage in the domains both of anxiety-inducing and boring situations in daily life. Indeed the fitting of one’s internal state to the demands of specific action, as in flow, has been an ideal of many Asian systems for self-development. In the words of the Zen master Unmon: “If you walk, just walk. If you sit, just sit. But whatever you do, don’t wobble.”

The phenomenology of flow shares many attributes of the meditation adept’s mental state as described in Abhidhamma: clarity of perception, alertness, equanimity; and pliancy, efficiency, and skill in action. To the degree that the lasting effects of meditation approach this ideal, the flow state can be seen as one benefit of meditation.

In this sense the goal of meditation training coincides in part with the qualities of skilled behavior and, more generally, with flow: action unimpeded by anxiety, clarity of perception, and accuracy of response, pleasure in action for its own sake. The nature of this experience is aptly capsulized in Merton’s translation of a poem by the Taoist master Chuang Tzu:

Ch’ui the draftsman
Could draw more perfect circles freehand
Than with a compass.

His fingers brought forth
Spontaneous forms from nowhere. His mind
Was meanwhile free and without concern.

No drives, no compulsions,
No needs, no attractions: Then your affairs
Are under control.
You are a free man.

How to Meditate

For the reader who would like to try meditating, here are some simple practices. You can try them all, but if you are going to continue to meditate, it is best to stick with the one you find most to your liking.

Find a comfortable, straight-back chair in a quiet room where you will not be disturbed. Sit up straight but relaxed. Keep your head, neck, and spine aligned, as though a large helium balloon was lifting your head up. Keeping your head upright will help your mind stay more alert-and alertness is essential in meditation.

Close your eyes and keep them closed until the session has ended. It’s best to sit for at least 15 minutes at a time, preferably longer-20 or 30 minutes or even an hour if possible. You should decide how long you plan to sit before you begin. That way you won’t yield so easily to the temptation to get up and do something “urgent” or “more useful.” Urges to stop meditating will come and go, and you should resist them. Set a timer or peek at your watch from time to time to see if the session is over.

Meditation on the Breath. One of the simplest practices is meditation on the breath. This practice cultivates both concentration and mindfulness. Although it was the method that reportedly brought the Buddha to enlightenment, it also has found a more mundane use in psychotherapy and behavioral medicines as a technique for becoming deeply relaxed. To begin, bring your awareness to your breath, noticing each inhalation and exhalation. You can watch the breath either by feeling the sensations at the nostrils or by noting the rise and fall of your belly as you breathe.

Try to be aware of each breath for its full duration: the entire in-breath, the entire out-breath. Do not try to control your breath-just watch it. If your breathing gets more shallow, let it be shallow. If it gets faster or slower, let it. The breath regulates itself.
While you meditate, your job is simply to be aware of it.

Whenever you notice that your mind has wandered, gently bring it back to your breath. During meditation, your contract with yourself is that everything other than your breath-thoughts, plans, memories, sounds, sensations-are distractions. Let go of your other thoughts. Whatever comes into your mind besides your breath is, for now, a distraction.

If you have trouble keeping your mind on your breath, you can help maintain your focus by repeating a word with each inhalation and exhalation. If you are watching your breath at the nostril, think “in” with each inhalation, “out” with each exhalation. If you are watching the rise and fall of your belly, think “rising” with each inhalation, “falling” with each exhalation. Be sure to stay in touch with the actual experience of breathing, not merely the repetition of the words.

Mantra. Some of the most widely used concentrative meditations employ mantras as the objects of focus. These techniques, as we have seen, are found in virtually every major spiritual tradition, from Christianity, Judaism, and Islam to Buddhism and Hinduism. In modern times, the technique has been adapted as the “relaxation response” to help people enter a relaxed state.
Pick a simple word or sound that has a positive meaning to you. Many people select a phrase that has spiritual symbolism for them, such as “adonai”, “kyrie eleison”, or “one.” In Hinduism, names of God such as “Ram” are common; in Tibetan Buddhism, the mantra “am Mane Padme Hum” is often used.

Once you decide what mantra you will use, the directions are similar to those for the breath meditation. Sit quietly and repeat your mantra mentally to yourself without making any actual sound. Whenever your mind wanders, bring it back to the mantra. Let go of all other thoughts, letting the mantra fill your consciousness.

Mindful Breathing. To cultivate mindfulness, start with the simple meditation on the breath described above. Once you have gained a fairly firm hold on meditating on the breath, you can expand the practice into a more general mindfulness-a meditation on the mind itself. In mindfulness meditation, everything that goes on in your mind becomes the object of meditation.
Again, use the breath as your basic object of meditation. But now, whenever your mind wanders, be aware of the nature of its wandering. In other words, use your distractions as objects of meditation.

For example, if your mind wanders to a sound you hear, label that distraction “hearing.” If your mind wanders to a thought, call it “thinking”; if to a memory, label it “remembering”; if to a sensation in your body, call it “feeling.” Each time you have labeled the distraction, bring your mind back to the breath once again.

Mindful Eating. With mindfulness, any activity can be meditative if you pay full and careful attention to what you are doing. Take, for instance, eating. The method in mindful eating is to pay careful and full attention to every aspect of the experience.

Begin by sitting still and bringing your attention to your breath, watching the in- and out-breath. When you feel collected and still, begin to eat.

It helps to eat very slowly, breaking down each movement so that you can attend to each nuance of sensation, sound, taste, and movement. For example, as you reach for a bite of food, do it at a speed in which you can note the stretch and tension of the muscles in your arm and hand and the feel of the food or fork against your skin. A void the tendency to go on “automatic,” to reach for the next bite before you finish with the current one.

Let’s say you’re going to eat almonds. Pick up one and hold it between your fingers. Feel the texture of its skin against your fingertips and the shape and pressure while holding it. Look at it: Notice its color and outline and the grooves along its sides. Slowly raise the almond to your mouth. Notice the moment you can first smell it. If you’re attentive, you may notice you’ve started salivating before the almond reaches your mouth. Be aware of the first brush of the almond on your lips.

Next, put it in your mouth and start chewing slowly and deliberately. Notice the feel of your teeth biting through the almond and the work of your tongue as it moves the chunks of almond inside your mouth. Note the nut’s taste. Listen to the sounds of chewing. Tune in to the sensations created by every bite.

Notice how the chewed almond bits mix with saliva as you swallow. Be sure to chew all the bits completely and to swallow them before you take another almond. Continue eating each remaining almond with the same careful deliberateness. Stay calm and focused throughout.

Mindful Walking. Take your shoes off. Stand in one place and feel the sensations in your feet as they touch the ground. Stay with whatever you feel at each moment. As you are about to take a step forward, notice your mental intention to step forward. Slowly lift your foot, feeling every sensation-lightness, suspension, tension, motion whatever feelings are present.

It’s best to start at a slow pace so you can pay attention to the sensations. Eventually, you’ll be able to go faster and yet maintain awareness. Move your foot forward, place it on the ground again, and shift your weight onto it. All the time, be aware of the sensations in this movement. When thoughts arise, don’t be concerned with their content. Bring your mind back to your foot feelings and stay with this simple experience of walking. Continue to do this as long as you like-five minutes to half an hour or longer.

At first, to keep your mind focused, it helps to label the action. For example, you can say silently, “Up-forward-down,” noticing the feeling of weight as it shifts from one foot to the other. Later you can simplify the process by eliminating the words. Just concentrate on the sensation.

To observe the process of mind in greater detail, note the intention that precedes each motion, as well as the sensations themselves. Thus: intending to lift, lifting; intending to move forward, moving forward; intending to place, placing; intending to shift, shifting.

Finally, you can develop a direct perception of the entire routine-intent, movement, sensations-without labeling any of it.

For those with Little Dust: Pointers on the Teachings of Ramana Maharshi – Arthur Osborne

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The Direct Path
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The ways of undertaking this task are innumerable, but it will suffice here to divide them into three general categories: exoteric religion, indirect spiritual paths, and the Direct Path of Self-inquiry.

The way of exoteric religion progressively replaces egoism by submission to the will of God. Its four cardinal precepts are faith, love, humility, and good deeds. As far as they are complied with, these precepts effectively lead people toward Self realization, although this is not consciously envisaged. True, the goal is not likely to be attained in a single lifetime, but in God’s patience a lifetime is very little. Faith strengthens the intuitional conviction of the reality of God or the Self. Humility, its counterpart, weakens the belief in the ego and lessens the importance attached to it. Love strives to surrender the ego to God and its welfare to others. Good deeds deny egoism in practice and are both the fruit and proof of love and humility. Therefore, Bhagavan sometimes encouraged this way when speaking to those whose nature did not draw them to a more conscious sadhana.

When we practice indirect sadhana, we strengthen, purify, and harmonize the mind by various techniques, enabling it to hold to the quest of the Self, which is often conceived as Father, Mother, or Lover. Bhagavan never denied the efficacy of such methods. Once, when a woman said that Self-inquiry did not help her and asked whether she could follow some other way, he replied, ”All ways are good.” However, since he was opening a more direct and potent path-one more suited to the conditions of modern life, he did consistently question people following other, less direct paths. He referred to them as “the thief turned policeman, to catch the thief that is himself.” The thief is the ego or mind, which usurps the reality of the Self, and by these indirect methods of sadhana, the mind is trained as a policeman to catch and condemn itself.

On such a path there is the danger that the thief turned policeman may acquire police powers, and then its thievish nature may reassert itself and do far more harm than it ever could before. The ego may acquire powers and perceptions beyond the physical and then persuade itself and others that it is the Self and become that most terrible scourge, a false guru, consuming others to feed its unconfessed vanity. Or, it may simply entrench itself at some high post that it imagines to be final but which, beautiful though it may be, is no more final than the physical body is. In any case, the mind must at last be extinguished in the Self, which alone exists. Bhagavan taught that it is simpler and more direct to strive to do so from the beginning by awakening awareness of the Self and yielding [the ego] before it.

This is the Direct Path as taught by Bhagavan: to forget the ego and discover the Self, not as one self discovering another, but by awakening awareness of the Self, by beginning, occasionally and imperfectly at first, but ever more constantly and powerfully, to be the Self. In this sense “knowing is being.”
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After some practice, this meditation awakens a current of awareness, a consciousness of “I” in the Heart-not the ego sense, but a feeling of the essential “I” who is the Universal Self, unaffected by good or ill fortune or by sickness or health. We should develop this consciousness by constant effort until it becomes increasingly frequent and finally a constant undercurrent to all the actions of life. Then, if we can stop our egoism from interfering, this awareness may deepen into an ever vaster peace beyond all understanding, until the moment when it consumes the ego and remains as the abiding realization of Self.

If various thoughts come up during meditation, one should not get caught up by them and follow them, but look at them objectively and inquire, “Where did this thought come from, and why, and to whom?” As they pass away like clouds across a clear sky, each thought leads back to the basic “I” -thought: “Who am I?” The very essence of the meditation requires that there is no mental or verbal answer. There cannot be, since the Self transcends thought and words. The ego is seeking what is before its origin and beyond its source, and the answer will not be grasped by it but will grasp and devour it.

I came to devour Thee but Thou has devoured me; now there is peace, Arunachala.
-Arunchala Aksharamanamalai (v. 8), by Sri Ramana Maharshi.

The beginning of the answer involves awakening a current of awareness, a sense of Being, in the heart. This awareness is neither physical nor mental, though body and mind are both aware of it. We can no more describe it than we can describe hearing to a deaf person.

If impure thoughts arise during meditation, we should look at them and dispel them in the same way, this way base tendencies are accordingly recognized and dissipated. As Bhagavan has said:

All kinds of thoughts arise in meditation. That is only right, for what lies hidden in you is brought out. Unless it rises up, how can it be destroyed?

Just as Self-inquiry is not a mental exercise, so also it is not a mantra. When questioned, Bhagavan replied quite definitely that it should not be repeated as a mantra, but used in the manner described.

Every spiritual path requires both purity of living and intensity of spiritual effort, and the vichara given by Bhagavan serves as a technique of pure and dispassionate living no less than as a technique of meditation. If anything happens to offend or flatter you, ask, “Who is injured, who is pleased or angry, who am I?” Therefore, by use of vichara, the “I-am-the doer illusion” can be destroyed and one can take part in everyday life aloofly, without vanity or attachment. Bhagavan represented it as the bank cashier who handles enormous sums of money unemotionally and yet quite efficiently, knowing that it is not his money.

In the same impersonal way, we can attend to all the affairs of life, knowing that the real Self is unaffected by them; and every attack of greed, anger, or desire can be dispelled by vichara. It must be dispelled, because it is no use repeating that one is the Self and acting as though one were the ego. Real, even partial, awareness of the Self weakens egoism. Egoism, whether expressed as vanity, greed, or desire, proves that recognition of the Self is merely mental.

In adapting an ancient path to modern conditions, Bhagavan in effect created a new path. The ancient path of Self Inquiry was pure Jnana Marga, to be followed by the recluse in silence and solitude, withdrawn from the outer world. Bhagavan made it a path to be followed invisibly in the world, in the conditions of modern life.

He never encouraged anyone to give up life in the world. He explained that such a giving up would only exchange the thought “I am a householder” for the thought “I am a sanyasin,” whereas what is necessary is to reject the thought “I am the doer” completely and remember only “I-am.” This approach can be done by means of vichara, equally while in the city or in the forest. Only inwardly can a person leave the world by leaving the ego-sense; only inwardly can one withdraw into solitude by abiding in the universal solitude of the Heart. This represents true solitude because there are no others, however many forms the Self may assume. Life in the world is not merely permissible, but a useful part of the Karma Marga inherent in the way of Bhagavan.

The outer discipline of Self-inquiry requires a constant check on actions and on the motive from which they spring. Sincerely and constantly applied, it removes the need for any formal code of conduct, for it strikes directly at egoism in every action and reaction. The impulses of the ego will not change immediately. An insult will still cause anger and a flattering remark, pleasure. Attachment to property and comfort will still continue and the senses will still clamor, but all such impulses will be exposed for what they are, so that one is able to recognize egoism and feel shame and reluctance over each of its manifestations. From that point the eradication of egoism will begin, a task demanding constant effort and remembering.
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A phenomenon such as Bhagavan’s own immediate realization of the Self is extremely rare, and he never led others to expect that it would happen to them. Actually, to desire success or even to think about it is itself an impediment, since it means desiring achievement for the ego instead of trying to eliminate the ego through the inquiry, “Who am I?”

The vibrant awareness of the Self becomes more frequent and uninterrupted until it awakens the moment one sits in meditation. In time it becomes constant, not only in hours of meditation,. but underlying all the actions of life. In proportion, as awareness of the Self becomes stronger and more continuous, the ego grows weaker and subsequently purified in preparation for its final immolation. Bhagavan said:

The moment the ego-self tries to know itself, it changes in character; it begins to partake less and less of the body, in which it is absorbed, and more and more of pure consciousness, the Self or Atman.

The Forty Verses on Reality, composed by Bhagavan, is the doctrine of the Direct Path. In verses 29 and 30, he thus succinctly describes it:

The path of Knowledge is only to dive inward with the mind, not uttering the word “I,” and to question whence, as “I,” it rises. To meditate “This is not I” or “That I am” may be an aid, but how can it form the inquiry?

When the mind, inwardly inquiring “Who am I?” attains the Heart, something of itself manifests as “I-I,” so that the individual “I” must bow in shame. Though manifesting, it is not “I” by nature but Perfection, and this is the Self.

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Self-Inquiry
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Although the term “meditation” is conventionally used for Self-inquiry, it does not fall into the dictionary definition of the term. Meditation requires and object, something to meditate on, whereas inquiry focuses only on the subject. You are not looking for anything new, anything outside yourself, but simply concentrating on Being, on your self, on the pure “I am” of you. It is not about thinking, but about suspending thoughts while retaining consciousness.

Normally, when thought subsides, you go to sleep; and when one first begins inquiry the mind often does try to do so. An attack of overwhelming sleepiness may come over you. However, as soon as you stop the inquiry and turn to another occupation sleepiness passes, thereby proving that it was not real tiredness, but an instinctive resistance to thought-free consciousness. One simply has to be vigilant against it.

Thoughts themselves are a far more persistent obstruction. They rush into the mind in an unending stream. If you drive them out, others slip in from behind. You believe you are free from thought and before you notice it, you are indulging others. The only way out is through persistence and constant alertness. One should not get carried away by thoughts, but see them aloofly like clouds passing over a clear sky, while asking, “What is this thought? Who did it come to? To me, but who am I?” This way, you bring your mind back to the inquiry. The mind is like a monkey rushing from tree to tree, ever restless, never content to be still. It has to be checked from its restlessness and held firmly to inquiry.

However, the wandering nature of the mind and the unending succession of thoughts are not the obstruction; it is also the ego-drive behind many of the thoughts. This gives them power and makes them far harder to dispel. You may convince yourself intellectually that there is no ego and may have occasional brief glimpses of Being-Consciousness, which is unruffled happiness at the time the ego is absent. But still you are drawn to a particular person, or want to impress a special friend, or wish to dominate a specific group; you may resent criticism, feel insecure in your job, cling to your possessions, or hanker after money or power. All of these are affirmations of the ego, which you believe does not exist. So long as they exist, it does, too. If there is no ego, who feels anger, desire, resentment, or frustration?

This means that inquiry is not merely a cold investigation but a battle; every path is in every religion. The ego, or apparent ego, has to be eradicated. This is the one essential aspect common to all religions. The only difference is how to do it. Some paths will have you attack various vices individually and cultivate opposing virtues, but Self-inquiry is more direct. These progressive methods are like lopping the branches off a tree: So long as the roots and trunk remain, fresh ones will grow. Self-inquiry aims at uprooting the tree itself. If the ego is deprived of one outlet, others will develop. However, if the ego itself is dissolved, the vices in which it found expression will collapse like deflated balloons. What is required is constant vigilance until the ego is finally dissolved.

Self-inquiry, which aims at ego dissolution, does not teach one theory or doctrine. It is quite possible to know all the doctrine that is necessary before starting: “Being simply is and you are That.” A certain amount of practice brings an increase in the frequency and length of the experience of timeless Being, which is also pure awareness and unruffled happiness. Although not based in the mind, the mind is aware of it. Although not physical, the body feels it as a vibration or a waveless calm. Once awakened, it begins to appear spontaneously, even when you are not “meditating.” It exists as an undercurrent to whatever you are doing in your daily routine, whether talking or even thinking.

Concerning approach, this is an important point. It explains why Bhagavan preferred his devotees to follow the quest in their everyday lives. Sitting daily in “meditation” is useful and, in most cases, indispensable, but it is not enough. So far as possible, fixed times should be set aside for it, since the mind accustoms itself to them, just as it does to physical functions like eating and sleeping, and therefore responds more readily. For people who are bound by professional and domestic obligations, just after waking in the morning and before going to sleep at night are excellent times. But apart from that, Bhagavan would tell people to always practice inquiry, to ask themselves, “Who is doing this?” -to engage in activity without the “I-am-the-doer illusion.” Keeping up this attitude of mind throughout the day’s activities is equivalent to remaining alert, welcoming the sense of Being whenever it comes. Constant alertness and remembering is necessary when not formally “meditating.” Initially, there will be frequent forgetting. The “current of awareness” needs to be cultivated and fostered. It is very seldom that there is accomplishment without effort.
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The problem that philosophers and theologians set for themselves is unreal, being based on the false assumption of an ego to be predestined. Additionally, the problem is insoluble, because the two alternatives are quite irreconcilable. If anything currently exists in the divine foreknowledge of an omniscient God, then it cannot be changed by free will. If this foreknowledge does not exist, then God does not know what is going to happen and is not omniscient. If life is predestined, it is like sitting in a movie theater and watching a film. We may not know what is coming next, but the ending has already been filmed according to the screenplay. However, if there is free will, it is like watching an impromptu television show in which the actors and camera operators have no idea of what will take place next.

The compromise that some theorists are fond of suggesting-that God has only predetermined important matters and left the unimportant for people to fill in-is too unintelligent and anthropomorphic to even merit refutation. In any case, who decides what is important? And on what scale of values? A young man is invited to the capital city of his country to be interviewed for a job in the Foreign Service and he decides to go. Obviously, this is an important decision since it will change his cultural and social environment, the person he marries, the children he fathers, and the whole course of his life. On his way to the airline office to book a seat on a plane, he meets a friend who invites him to travel to the capital in his car. When the young man accepts the offer, it seems like a relatively unimportant decision, which our hypothetical Grandfather God might well leave to the young man to decide for himself. However, he does not get the job, so the important decision turns out to have been unimportant. In the meanwhile, the plane he was scheduled to take to the interview crashes and all the passengers are killed.

Thus, the “unimportant decision” he made gives him thirty or forty more years of life and is vitally important not only to him but to the woman he is going to marry, the children he will father, their future wives, children, and business partners-in fact, to an unending succession of people, generation after generation. The whole theory is too absurd for discussion.

People cling to such absurdities because there is nothing a person finds more difficult than facing up to the truth of anatta (no-ego). Even people who accept it theoretically often find some way of avoiding its implications, perhaps because they imagine that the alternative to ego-identification would be mere nothingness.

Yet life itself proves that this is not so, since everyone experiences no-ego in the state of deep dreamless sleep and still retains a sense of existence. The only question is “who” or “what” experiences that egoless state? Actually, the alternative to the illusion of an ego is the Reality of inexhaustible, radiant Being.

So long as the appearance of an ego remains, so does the appearance of free will; in fact, they are mutually dependent. Therefore, Maharshi said:

Free will exists together with the individuality. As long as the individuality lasts, so long is there free will. All the scriptures are based on this fact and advise directing the free will in the right channel.
-The Teachings of Ramana Maharshi in His Own Words

In the actual affairs of life, those who have not realized anatta go by appearances, and it makes practically no difference whether they believe in predestination or not. In either case, they do not know what is predestined and make decisions using their initiative, and act according to their nature in doing so. Any attempt to limit their conduct on the pretext of predestination would involve the presumptuous and patently untrue corollary that they know what is predestined. For instance, suppose you are sitting on the bank of a river when a girl falls into the water. To say, “It is her destiny to drown,” and to let her drown would be a presumptuous supposition that this is her destiny. All that you know up to that moment is that it is the child’s destiny to fall into the water within reach of an adult (yourself who is capable of rescuing her. Since what is to happen is bound up with your own decisions, it makes no practical difference whether these do not yet exist or are simply not yet known to you. In either case, the decisions are made in ignorance of the outcome.

All the activities that the body is to go through are determined when it first comes into existence. It does not rest with you to accept or reject them. The only freedom you have is to turn your mind inward and renounce activities there.
-The Teachings of Ramana Maharshi in His Own Words

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To Those With Little Dust

It is related (and the story is no less significant whether historically true or not) that after attaining Enlightenment the Buddha’s first impulse was to abide in the effulgence of Bliss without turning back to convey the incommunicable to humankind. Then he reflected, “There are some who are clear-sighted and do not need my teachings, and some whose eyes are clouded with dust who will not heed it though given, but between these two there are also some with but little dust in their eyes, who can be helped to see; and for the sake of these I will go back among mankind and teach.”

This story shows that there is a more satisfactory state than that of ignorant, confused, unguided, frustrated modern humanity, and a higher, more satisfying, and more durable alternative than any provided by wealth or luxury, art or music, or the love between man and woman. Such a state can be attained in his lifetime, and the purpose of all religions has been to lead people towards it, although in many different ways. I say “towards” rather than “to” because although the supreme state may not be attained in this lifetime, merely approaching it can bring peace of mind and a sense of well being not otherwise attainable.

Mystics often have had unsought glimpses of a higher or the highest state; those who are psychic have out-of-the-body and other experiences closed to the ordinary person; but all this means little in the quest for Realization. Such experiences may help at certain stages of certain types of paths, but they may also hinder and distract, like the sirens that Odysseus heard but against whom he made his crew plug their ears. If the pleasures of the physical world are seductive, those of the subtle world are certainly no less so. Christ said that if one attains the kingdom of heaven, all else shall be added, but that is after attaining. If one seeks all else beforehand, one is not likely to attain.

Those who have such powers and experiences do not find the quest to be shorter and less arduous than those who do not have them. Realization is not something like music, for which some are by nature more gifted than others. It is fundamentally different, since music requires the development of a faculty that is stronger in some and weaker in others. Realization, however, involves the discovery of and identification with one’s true Self, which contains all faculties.

We cannot easily predict who can and will understand spiritual truth. It has certainly nothing in common with intellectual ability, as commonly understood. Indeed, the scriptures of the different religions agree by warning us that neither intellect nor learning is any qualification. In fact, they can generally be a hindrance:

It is rather the unlearned who are saved than those whose ego has not yet subsided in spite of their learning. -The Collected Works of Ramana Maharshi

The humble knowledge of oneself is a surer way to God than deep researches after science.
-The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas a Kempis

A scientist may fail to understand spiritual science, a philosopher may be unreceptive to the Perennial Philosophy, while a psychologist may remain ignorant of what underlines the mind. On the other hand, a spiritual master mayor may not be an intellectual: Ramana Maharshi was, but Sri Ramakrishna was an ecstatic with the mind rather of a peasant than a philosopher. St. Ignatius Loyola was temperamentally so averse to study that it required immense effort for him to gain the degree without which the Church would not allow him to teach, and he was middle-aged before he did so.

While theoretical understanding is not enough, neither is belief in the sense of a conviction that this or that will happen after death. What is needed is to set one’s hand to the plough, as Christ put it, to undertake the true alchemy, transmuting the dross in one’s nature to gold.

This is the quest of the Sangrail(Holy Grail), the search for the elixir of life, the eternal youth of the Spirit. It requires a willingness to open one’s heart to the truth, to surrender oneself and give up the ego, and to conceive of the possibility of its nonexistence. It is the pathway of heroes, the way from trivialities to grandeur. Its consummation is like waking up from a dream into the ever-existent Reality.

Where Charity Begins

I have written that the quest for Realization is the great I enterprise, the true goal of life. Yet one often hears the objection, “But isn’t it more important to help others?” ! Although some who make this objection doubtless do so in good I faith, it is essentially a hypocritical attack on spirituality. It I goes back to the nineteenth-century socialists who said, “First things first. Let us first remove people’s poverty, then there will be time to consider their spiritual needs.” Well, they partially succeeded. There is very little poverty left in northeastern Europe. However, did Europeans then turn to spiritual support? Not at all. The anti-spiritual trend only
accelerated and became more unabashed. Workers who acquired leisure, security, and competence had less time, not more, to devote to spirituality.

In fact, it is not true that welfare facilitates religion, that poverty impedes it, or that material needs are the “first things” to be attended to. Christ taught the exact opposite when the rich, young man approached him. He counseled the young man to give his property away and become a mendicant. If poverty can be an impediment, so also can prosperity. Indeed, it might well be said that in a welfare state prosperity is the opiate of the people, lulling them into a false sense of security.

One sign of the animus behind the do-good objection is that it is only used against those who turn to a spiritual path. If a person declares that his absorbing interest in life is music, business, or politics, no one will raise an objection. However, objections are raised when someone turns to religion. Why do people suppose that one who is striving to subjugate or destroy the ego is doing less to help others than one who allows it free-play? Rather, such a person is likely to do more, helping others in an unobtrusive way rather than engaging in organized charities. In general, there is likely to be less vanity and more genuine goodwill in this person’s behavior.
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As long as there is the concept of an “I,” there is a concept of others. As long as there are others to help, there is an “I” to help them and therefore no Self-realization. The two go together; they cannot be separated.

OTHERS
What will they think of this?
What will they say to that?
So others arise.
When there are others there’s I.
In truth there just IS.
Isness alone is;
No others, no I, only a dance, a rhythm, Only a being.

Of course, one has to play the game of “I and others,” acting as though they existed. It is as if (as can sometimes happen) one had a dream and took part in its events while at the same time being awake enough to know that it was a dream.

What, then, is this vow to help others before seeking one’s own Realization? Nothing but a resolve to remain in a state of ignorance (avidya). And how will that help others? It means clinging to the ego one has sworn to dissolve, regarding it as supremely wise and beneficent! In the language of theism, it reveals an overwhelming arrogance, the decision to show God how to run His world or to run it for Him.

Whatever may have been the traditional Mahayana discipline, this urge to help others by being a guru before one’s time is one of
the greatest pitfalls for the aspirant today. According to Milarepa, one of the great Mahayana saints,

One should not be over hasty in setting out to help others before one has realized the Truth; if one does, it is a case of the blind leading the blind.
-The Life of Milarepa, Tibet’s Great Yogi,
by Lobzang Jivaka and John Murray

We may find some compassion in vowing to help others, but more likely we will find more vanity and egoism. Few things so flatter the ego as the dream of being a guru surrounded by the adulation of disciples. Few things so impede an aspirant as turning one’s energy outwards to guide others when it should still be turned inwards to oneself. In spiritual things it is true, as the nineteenth-century economists falsely asserted about material things, that you help others most by helping yourself. Maharshi never indulged such people. He told them, “Help yourself first before you think of helping others.”
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Karma Marga
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The position of a Hindu sadhu or sannyasin is quite different. On renouncing property, family, and caste, he becomes a homeless wanderer. Nobody is responsible for his maintenance. He is expected to wander, begging for food and accepting whatever is given. If his presence makes a strong impression, followers may gather around him and attend to his needs. If he has some skill that is valued, he may accept food and shelter from an ashram in exchange for his services. He may even accept an allowance from his former family or from some benevolent householder but, generally, he has no material security, no routine of life, and no regular occupation.

During Maharshi’s lifetime, one often heard people ask his permission to renounce the world and go forth as sadhus, but I never once
heard him consent:

Why do you think you are a householder? The similar thought that you are a sannyasi will haunt you even if you go forth as one. Whether you continue in the household or renounce it and go to live in the forest, your mind haunts you. The ego is the source of thought. It creates the body and world and makes you think of being a householder. If you renounce it [your home life], it will only substitute the thought of renunciation for that of the family, and the environment of the forest for that of the household. But the mental obstacles are always there for you. They even increase greatly in the new surroundings. Change of environment is no help. The one obstacle is the mind, and this must be overcome whether in the home or in the forest. If you can achieve this in the forest, why not in the home? So why change the environment? Your efforts can be made even now, whatever be the environment.
-The Teachings of Ramana Maharshi in His Own Words

Notice that Bhagavan did not say, “The mental obstacles remain the same for you in the new surroundings,” but “They even increase greatly in the new surroundings.” In fact, I have seen a number of sad cases of this. A person’s professional work keeps the mind occupied on the surface while at the same time permitting an undercurrent of remembering or meditation. Bhagavan urged people to foster this undercurrent, to do one’s work impersonally, asking oneself, “Who does this work? Who am I?” As an illustration, he spoke about the actor who plays his part on the stage quite well, although knowing at heart that he is not the person he acts. Therefore, the actor does not get elated if the playwright has allotted that person final success, or dejected if he has allotted failure or a tragic death.

A person’s professional work may be irksome; it often is. One may feel disappointed at how much more progress could be made if the whole day was free for spiritual practice. But before taking the drastic step of renouncing life in the world, one should try to occupy the mind exclusively with meditation or whatever spiritual practice one performs from the time of waking in the morning until sleep can no longer be held off at night. One will find that one cannot hold the mind persistently to the quest even for one whole day. Only at a high level of development does the mind cease to demand outer activity. Deprived of the irksome but relatively harmless activity of professional work, it will turn instead to more injurious activities such as daydreaming, planning, scheming, or social trivialities and, as Maharshi said, the mental obstacles will “increase greatly.”

Nor can we fill the gap by reading. We may find a certain amount of reading helpful and, in many cases, necessary, especially at the beginning, but excessive reading can become a drug, dulling the mind and distracting from real spiritual effort. Once the mind is convinced of the basic truth of Identity, why reconvince it over and over again? Why study techniques that one is not going to use; theories that one does not need? Sometimes something one reads may come as a useful reminder and spur one on to greater or wiser effort, but much of it acts just like a drug to keep the mind occupied. Reading may even lead to gluttony for useless facts, pride in possession of them, or arrogance at the thought of understanding more than the writer.

Family ties may also seem irksome. It may appear that one would have a freer mind for sadhana without them. Yet, in most cases, we can make family life a discipline for subduing egoism, which is the purpose of sadhana. Removing family ties all too often invites an upsurge of egoism, leaving a person free to think exclusively of oneself-the impression one is making on others, one’s progress on the path, even one’s physical health and material needs.

Of course, if a sannyasin really renounces everything and has to beg and cook his food, that may prove occupation enough, though not necessarily a nobler or more spiritually profitable activity than that which he has renounced. If, however, one retains sufficient means of subsistence to escape this and the mind remains without any occupation other than sadhana, there is grave danger of deterioration. Desire, which one may rashly thought to have conquered, may rise again. One may also fill the gap by setting oneself up as a guide to others when one should still be concentrating on one’s own progress. One may fall victim to undesirable activity or come under the domination of a false guide. Finally, one may simply sink into boredom and trivialities from which one will eventually seek escape by renouncing the quest entirely. One who has seen so many cases of renunciation leading to deterioration can only advise people earnestly to refrain and put up with the irksome but protective outer shell of professional and family life.

Moreover, spiritual growth, like the growth of a seed, takes place in the dark. Grace sinks down into it like gentle rain. Progress may be the greatest when least visible, even when one is dejected and thinks one is falling back. To strip away the outer cover of routine life and try to subject ourselves to the full, day-long glare of the conscious mind may do us incalculable harm. From this point of view, also, it is better not to renounce.

This caution, however, does not apply to Christians or Buddhists thinking of becoming monks since, as I said above, the monastic routine of life is, in most cases, quite an active Karma Marga, whether in the original or the modern meaning of the word.
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The Problem of Suffering

Some theorists are perplexed by what they call “the problem of suffering.” The philosopher Hume even thought he had discovered in it a weapon to destroy religion. God, he argued, in order to be God, must be both good and omnipotent, but the existence of suffering proves that God either does not want to prevent it or is unable to, which is to say that God is either not good or not omnipotent, and in either case is not God. Therefore, there is no God.

Certainly one can agree that there is no anthropomorphic God of the sort that Hume envisaged, no kind, old man sitting in a back room, working out people’s destinies and allotting rewards and punishments. There is no God with a human scale of values; no God made in the likeness of humankind. To postulate such a God would mean that the object of human life is mundane happiness, and God’s job is to ensure it. There are people who get through life with no great suffering-no actual hunger, no lack of clothing or shelter, reasonable security, fairly friendly relations with those around them, few long or painful illnesses, and finally, death while sleeping. Is that the perfect life? If God could arrange for everyone to get by as easily as that, would He have done his job? Would He be accepted by such critics? Then why did Christ tell some of his followers to give up their possessions and become mendicants? Why did he draw people to a life in which, he warned them, they would be persecuted and even killed? Obviously, he had a totally different conception of values.

The question of suffering is bound up with the question of values, and this is dependent on the meaning or purpose of life. Do those who complain of suffering recognize any meaning or purpose at all? If their aim is not merely to get by without too much hardship, what is it? To serve others? That would mean to help others get by without too much hardship, so that ultimately it comes to the same thing. Is there anything for which it is ultimately worthwhile to face suffering? If not, life would indeed be dismal.
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Quest and Egoism

Sometimes our first perception of truth has a transforming effect, bringing out all that is beautiful within us, so that our friends find us to be a new and delightful person. But that is only temporary. In the aftermath of awakening, our vast tendencies may surface. Those who marveled at our improvement may begin to find us worse than before and question whether it would not have been better had we never put our hand to the plough. At this point, the armies of our noble and regressive tendencies must enter into battle, which in fact may last a lifetime.

Even with this understanding, how do we explain the many cases of aspirants who were outright egoists before they took to the path and seem to remain so afterwards? Moreover, what of the good, kind-hearted people who do not take any path? When Christ was asked why he associated with riff-raff, he answered the sick need a doctor, not the healthy. There may have been some sarcasm in this statement, since one can hardly imagine that those who challenged Christ were spiritually healthy. Nevertheless, those who recognize that they are spiritually sick often seek treatment. That is why it is so often eccentrics and outsiders that become aspirants.

An American woman once asked Bhagavan why we should seek Realization, and he answered, “Who asks you to if you are satisfied with life as it is?” But he went on to explain that people often become dissatisfied with life and they turn to God for guidance. This insight explains why the good, comfortable, kind-hearted people seldom become seekers. They lack the spur of initial discontent to start them off. Christ said that those who seek shall find, but before one even knows that there is anything to seek, one may have to reject the sham satisfaction provided by everyday life. Tragic events may turn a nonseeker into a seeker, yet the call beckons the prosperous no less than the indigent, the successful as well as the failures. The call may stem from boredom, as well as tragedy.

There is also another, more psychological explanation why many egoists take the path (and it is only a matter of degree, because we are all egoists, more or less, until the ego is extinguished). Although committed to self-destruction, the ego has grand expectations of achievement. Some mystery religions have treated initiates like a king or a god for a year, only to be sacrificed at the year’s end. This process symbolizes ego-death, except that on the spiritual path, we do not have a fixed term for our self-sacrifice, and we can postpone it indefinitely. Even if the ego chooses not to make the hazardous choice of self denial, everyday life will confront it with the ultimate extinction of death.

The quest goes in alternate waves of expansion and contraction, symbolized by Jupiter and Saturn. Our task in this process remains quite simple-what we have to do is to keep the mind still, take cognizance of outer happenings, concentrate on the mere fact of Being, and remain poised and alert for promptings from within. It is as simple as that. Although it is simple, few people find it easy. While shaving or stirring the porridge, we are tempted to let the mind ramble on incessantly over “What I will say to George in the office?” and so on. These ramblings have two features in common. First, they center around a character called “I” who measures all events in terms of good and evil, advantage and disadvantage; sages declare this “I” to be fictitious. Second, these mental rumblings add nothing to the success of that presumptive character, but merely mull over what has already been decided or will have to be decided in due course. They have the disastrous effect of deafening the mind to the still, small voice of the Self and preventing spiritual intuition or awareness of Self from flowing. In this way the presumptive “I,” like an evil ghost, seems to usurp clear awareness of the Self.

While the mind of the student is filled with rambling thought, the mind of the realized person is dead [to identification with thought]. Though this statement appears paradoxical, the mind of the Sage is quite alive for receiving impressions. Inwardly, it receives awareness and intuitions of the Self, while outwardly it cognizes things and events. In both cases, the mind does not usurp the role of creator, projecting an imaginary world for an illusory being. Still, receptive, able to reflect the light of the Self, the mind also functions more efficiently when set free from its habitual agitated state.

Most people find it rather difficult to end the mind’s rumbling and to experience pure awareness of Being. Thus, the paths laid down by different religions offer them support. Asking oneself “Who am I?,” being mindful of one’s actions, watching the breath, repeating a mantra, concentrating on a scriptural text, or puzzling over an insoluble problem-all these are methods to control and still the mind.
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This and That

Why should a quest be necessary? Why should a person not grow naturally into their true state, like a horse or an oak tree? Why should human beings alone, of all creatures, be tempted to misuse their faculties and have to curb their desires to grow to their true breadth and stature? To answer this question, we must understand what differentiates human beings from other creatures. Some researchers have attributed the difference simply to the greater intelligence and ability that comes from our more developed brain. This is patently untrue. Many creatures have greater ability than we do in one ability or another. A hawk has keener sight, a migratory bird has a better memory for places and directions, a dog has a stronger sense of smell, and a bat has a wider range of hearing. What really distinguishes human beings from other creatures is self-consciousness. Not only are we human beings, but we know consciously that we are. We may see this faculty with greater intelligence, but not in the commonly understood sense of outwardly turned intelligence. Being self-conscious implies the deliberate use of our faculties and the power of deciding how and whether to use them. And this power is also a necessity. Having the power to direct our faculties imposes on us the necessity of doing so, since even refusal to do so would be our choice or direction, and not spontaneous as with other creatures.

Theologians express the dilemma of human consciousness in the belief that God gave human beings free will. With it comes the choice of whether to obey or disobey God, and thus to work out our own weal or woe. Intellectuals often scoff at such doctrines, which are only picturesque expressions of fundamental truths. We simply cannot use our faculties as naturally as a bird or fox can, because we lack a natural human action, while there is a natural bird-action or fox-action. Humans, of course, have certain natural instincts, just as a bird or fox has (i.e., the instincts to eat, procreate and preserve life), but humans mayor may not choose to obey them in any specific situation related to the complexities of life. Our selfconsciousexistence forces us to choose how to use our faculties. Even when we attempt to use them in what is considered the natural way we are making a choice, and we could surely find someone to contest it. We call this choice free will, which is, therefore, not only a prerogative but an obligation for us.
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Before we are drawn to the quest, we are directly conscious of only one being, which could therefore be called “this” -this which wants coffee for breakfast, this which has a toothache, this which decides to call on so-and-so or read such-and-such a book. We know other people, things, and events only indirectly, through our senses (including our reason, which Vedanta calls the “inner sense”). However, a time may come when we apprehend Beingof another kind: potent, unconfined, awe-inspiring, which we may think of as “That.” Hereafter, the dominant theme of life is the relationship between “this” and “That,” between the individual who experiences, classifies, and decides and the dimly perceived Reality. Our mental training decides whether we regard “That” as other than “this” or as the hidden Self of it. In any case, theoretical conclusions help us very little. What opens before one is a dynamic venture, the attempt to subordinate “this” to “That.” Ramana Maharshi said:

Under whatever name and form one may worship the Absolute Reality, it is only a means for realizing it without name and form. That alone is true Realization, wherein one knows oneself in relation to that Reality, attains peace and realizes one’s identity with It.
-Forty Verses on Reality (v. 5)

The attempt to do this is the quest. Becoming convinced of the identity of “this” with “That” means realizing it. In fact, intellectual understanding arrives only as the preliminary position from which to set out on the quest of Realization. “This” feels not only the power, but also the grace and pervading beauty of “That,” and is strongly attracted to it. Whether we call “That” God or Self, this is shaken by powerful waves of love and devotion toward it. The attraction is so powerful that “this” feels itself being drawn in to be devoured and merged in “That.” It also senses that absorption will produce what is called “the peace that passeth all understanding.” At the same time, “this” struggles against being absorbed, clinging tenaciously to the surface life which Christ exhorted it to give up. It still wants its own separate individual existence, along with its own decisions and enjoyments. Therefore, it may feel waves of resentment or actual hostility to “That.”

I sought to devour thee; come now and devour me; then there will be peace, Arunachala!
-The Marital Garland of Letters (v. 28), by Sri Ramana Maharshi

That is why (except in the rarest of cases) the quest is not a single, simple event. Normally, “this” clings to its separate, individual life with one hand, while reaching out for the vast, universal life with the other. Moreover, the two cannot co-exist. “This” must surrender utterly to “That” and consent to be devoured before it can merge in the peace of supreme Identity. And it fights against it persistently and cunningly, constantly changing its ground, weapons, and tactics. When “this” is dislodged from one fortress, it slips around the rear of the attacker and sets up another.

Therefore, the uneven course that the quest takes is never a gradual, smooth ascent. It always goes in alternate waves of grace and deprivation, expansion and contraction. A phase when life is a lilt of beauty is followed by one of harsh aridity, when all that was achieved seems lost, and all grace withdrawn. This alternation happens because when “this” turns in love and humility to “That,” it draws upon itself the grace, which is uninterruptedly radiating from “That,” like light from the sun; “this” then steals the grace for its own use or aggrandizement. Whether in thought or deed, it grows proud, considers the grace its own, and thus interposes its own dark shadow before the luminosity of “That,” causing an eclipse and shutting off the flow of grace. Again and again it repeats this pattern, learning only gradually and by repeated bitter experience. Only when, in final desperation, it brings itself to complete surrender, does lasting peace appear. Then “That” becomes “This.” There is no other.

Who is Who

We ask, “Who am I?” but is there an “I”? Initially, we presume that there is. Then, we ask who or what it is. There just IS-not I, he, it, or anything, just IS.

We try to divide up this simple IS by pronouns-I, he, you and by “this” and “that,” but is it really divisible? I feel Being and use the word “I” for it, but that does not mean that there is any separateness about it. You also feel Being and use the same word “I” for it of course, because it is the same being.

Outwardly, Being takes form as a world of things and events. It cognizes this world by means of “my” faculties. In fact, everyone has this sense of “me” and “my.” Being has three aspects. First, there just Is. Second, there is the manifest world. Third (or perhaps this should be put second), there is the focal point, the cluster of faculties called “me,” through which the manifest world is cognized. In all cases, pure Being or Is-ness remains the same, whether the manifest world and the “me” are there or not.

People often remark, “I am an infinitesimal, evanescent fragment in this vast universe.” True, but it is no less true that this vast universe is an infinitesimal, evanescent appearance within me. What-is remains the same, whether manifested in the universe or not. The pure sense of Being that I feel just is; it is the same as what-is. Saying that there is no “I” is the same as saying that there is nothing else.

To say that there is a subjective “me” and an objective “me” would open the door to misunderstanding, because all technical terms do that. However, at the same time it might point the way to understanding. Technical terms do that, too; that is why we find it so hard to abandon them. We could see the subjective “me” as the focal point between Being and the manifest world, and the objective “me” as that part of the manifest world which expresses itself on a par with you, Susan, James, and John. When, true to its nature, the subjective me sees every objective me equally; that is to say, it loves its neighbor as itself. It is attracted exclusively and completely back toward Being. That is to say, it loves God with all its heart and mind and strength.

In fact, fallen humanity is not true to its nature. People need authentic meditation experience before they even begin to feel impersonal “I” -ness, the unity of Being. Even when they do, they often continue feeling the restricted individual “I” sense. Every time I feel a thrill of pleasure at being praised or annoyance at being criticized; if I take the corner seat in a train and leave my companion a less comfortable place; when I take a second cup of tea and there is not enough to go round; or imagine myself in some role or dread some eventuality, I am proclaiming the individual “me” in action. And actions speak louder than words. What good is it to say that there is no ego, yet behave as though there were? Obversely, living on the assumption that there is an ego prevents one from realizing that there is not, and from realizing our true nature.

Many great Teachers, including Ramana Maharshi, have said that we are not bound, so there can be no Liberation. Yet, paradoxically, they have also urged us to seek Liberation. We must have a clear understanding of the words we use to avoid being tangled up in them. What are we liberated from? From the ego, our belief in an ego, or the illusion of an ego? If there is no ego then, of course, there can be no bondage to it and no need for Liberation from it. But so long as I live as though there were an ego, and take offense at an insult, there is an ego for me, and I am bound by it or by the service I render to it.

While my true Self is not bound, bondage to the (real or illusory) ego obscures the true Self. Realization of the Self is the same as Liberation from the ego.

What does it matter if I believe in a separate, individual self, an ego? Why do spiritual teachers speak of it as a sort of crime? Because it is. It is “original sin.” All technical terms, such as Self, ego, sin, God, or mind mislead us. These terms, which become personified like characters on a stage, need to be reexamined from time to time. Being (what-is) uses the mental faculty to report and circulate perceptions from the manifest world as submitted by my other faculties. However, very early in life this mental faculty begins to find some of the reports made to it pleasant and others disturbing. In this way, the mental faculty builds itself up into a fictitious person who demands the pleasant experiences and rejects (or tries to reject) the unpleasant ones. For this purpose, it uses and disposes of the other faculties. We call this fictitious person “mind” or “ego.” They are the same.
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Concentration and Detachment

What we need is simply to take things as they come, reacting in the way we feel to be right, interfering as little as possible. Then things will happen correctly of their own accord, and grace will flow unimpeded. We do not have to induce divine grace to flow, only to refrain from obstructing it.

Two kinds of obstruction prevent grace from flowing and make the path long and arduous: distraction and attachment. Therefore, we have to cultivate their opposites: concentration and detachment.

Let us first consider concentration. The untrained mind seldom can concentrate steadily on a particular thought at all for any length of time. It flits about restlessly from thought to thought. The same phenomenon occurs in conversation. For instance, at a social gathering people seldom talk things through to a conclusion or discuss any subject seriously, but instead butterfly talk, flitting from one topic to another. Let the person with an untrained mind see how long the mind can be held to anyone theme. Getting past thirty seconds would be a great achievement for such a person. How much training, then, do we need to hold the mind to pure awareness?

Some teachers prescribe exercises for concentration, but this approach is seldom more than a parlor game. When it does have any effect, it may do more harm than good unless the mind is simultaneously being purified. Egoism is more dangerous in a concentrated mind than in a distracted one.
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